#every plant is a punch in capitalism's face | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

bear-cubs-art-things · 1 year

Text

OKI OKI YOUNG ZECHARIAH AU FANFIC GOO-

part 1 yeeeee!!!

★~🐸~★

It was a beautiful morning in Wartwood. The sun glowed warmly in the pale blue sky, clouds of shimmery white glided along wind currents seemingly so calm. The soil smelled of dew and previous rainfall, plants along every water-body edge they could find. Or really any patch of dirt. Along with the earthy warm smell of dirt, wildflowers and bakery goods filled the air. It truly smelled like home.

His home. Zechariah Nettles.

Zechariah Phineas Nettles. 11 years old. 5 feet 4 inches. Lives with his grandmother Gretchen Basil Nettles and mother Juniper Autumn Yggdrasil. Has no siblings. Loves to read, listen to music, on occasion draw on scraplets of paper. Does chores more frequently than he thinks necessary. Works on his household farm (who didn't have a farm in Wartwood?). Green-grey with dark brown eyes, with a pale blue tongue. Kind and often shy, doesn't talk much.

You get the idea.

Often Zechariah would sit on the garden wall, looking off into the vague and unknown distance. Staring at the summer clouds, lost in daydream thought. He was a nice kid, they said. Soft spoken and well mannered.

And, some might say, a perfect target.

Wartwood, though a kind small town a ways from the capital, had its fair share of pricks and assholes. Unfortunately, older teens had it good with picking on poor 'Riah. Everyday it was the same.

"Staring off at the stars, huh, dreamerboy?"

"He doesn't have any friends, so he talks to the plants!"

"More working less dreaming farmerboy!!"

"I bet his mom hates him so he has to do all the farmwork."

"What's so interesting about the damn sky, huh?!"

"I bet his thoughts are his only company, and that isn't much company is it now?"

And everyday, Zechariah continues on. So deep in thought their sneers fly right between his ears (whatever passes as his ears). But even now and then, it gets bad.

Really bad.

Zechariah was just walking home from the market one day; a bag of assorted groceries for his grandma in one arm, a loaf of bread in the other. He was just a kid running another errand, minding his own business. Three big kids walked up to him.

"Whatcha got there?" asked the biggest one. A newt of dark fuchsia and slit eyes. At least that's what they looked like.

"Hm?" Zechariah responded softly, quietly, being brought back to reality from his daydream.

"I said," the fuchsia newt raised his voice, "whatcha got there."

"Groceries," once again Zechariah responded softly. Light words in the wind. Faint.

"What kind of groceries?" another sneered. A blue frog, high-pitched voice, short and stocky. Wore a newsboys cap. Kinda silly looking.

"Dunno" 'Riah shrugged. "Gramma gave me a list."

"Y'know young tadpoles like you shouldn't really wander alone without an adult," the newt chimed back in. "It can be dangerous."

"How so?"

"You never know," the newt swaggered closer to Zechariah, malice glittering in his eyes, "who might want to hurt you."

Almost as if it were rehearsed, the third one - a big burly red toad with no neck and a wide build - slugged a punch at Zechariah. Sent him straight to the mud.

And his groceries, which he was more upset about than his own physical wellbeing.

The frog joined in, kicking at Zechariah's face. The toad was still throwing punches, but at his sides. The newt stood there, arms folded, smiling and watching.

Zechariah merely trying to cover his head with his sticks-for-arms. Which, must be mentioned, was another part of him that Amphibians made fun of him of.

And when they were done with him, after Zechariah was beaten to a froggy pulp, the newt finally bent down to talk to him.

"Listen closely, little runt," he hissed.

Zechariah uncovered his eyes, looked up to meet the newt's.

Glittering with malice. Hatred. The need to hurt.

"You aren't welcomed here. This is OUR territory."

"Hnnnggh-"

The newt snapped (in a sense) and threw Zechariah up by the collar, so that he was dangling a good 6 inches off the ground. Battered and bruised, lips swollen and bleeding. He looked terrible, awfully terrible. He shouldn't even be in this situation right now... how have things escalated so quickly?

"If I see your dingy ass walking these streets again I WILL kill you." the newt hissed, foaming at the mouth. Insane. Bloodthirsty.

"Hnnngggghh" was the only thing to escape Zechariah's numb face.

The newt then delivered the final blow.

A merciless throwdown into the mud. Face first, if you will. And he laughed. So did the other two.

And they walked away, still laughing.

Zechariah, unable to feel much through the pain coursing through his veins and muscles, laid there in the mud. Groceries spoiled, his Gramma's copper wasted, his body battered in a lifeless heap.

He sighed. Didn't cry. Sighed.

He wasn't much of a crier. And for his age, he should've been crying at that first punch.

He just laid there. Still and breathing. Coping with the immense pain those teens had inflicted on him.

"They're jerks, huh?" an unfamiliar voice spoke.

"Mm hm..." was his muffled reply, quiet.

"I'm sorry they did that to you," the voice said again. "Really."

Zechariah felt his body being turned on his side and brought up to a sitting-up position. It wasn't hard because he was so light and thin.

What he was faced with was a royal purple newt with chin-length black hair curly at the ends, with a apologetic grin on his face. His eyes will filled with innocent brightness, hiding the apparent knowledge that he knew something about those teens that beat up Zechariah.

"My brother can be a pain sometimes, and I always have to clean his mess," he sighed. Sat in front of 'Riah. "I'm truly sorry he did this to you. Wrong place wrong time I guess."

"Mm hm..."

Purple Newt stuck out his hand. "I'm Brocky by the way. Brocky Fronds. That pink newt was my older bro Rasphy. He's always been a no-good."

"Hmm..."

Brocky glanced a long glance in the direction where Rasphy last went. He snapped his head back to Zechariah.

"So anyways, moving on from that, what's your name?"

"Hmh?"

"I introduced myself, and you have yet to do the same," Brocky pointed out. "In case you didn't hear me the first time, I said my name was Brocky."

"I heard that-" Zechariah replied.

"Woah he does speak!" Brocky snarked almost immediately, sarcastically. Zechariah chuckled a bit.

Zechariah stuck his hand out to meet Brocky's, and shook it. "I'm Zechariah Nettles."

" 'The Skinny-Legged Frog' they call you," Brocky jerked his head in Rasphy's direction. "My bro and his friends, I mean."

"They call me lots of things," Zechariah shrugged. "I never paid any attention to that much."

"Well, I know what I'm gonna call you, if you're alright with it," Brocky declared, standing up.

"What?" Zechariah looked up at him, bracing for whatever horrible nickname Brocky was going to give him. Not like he cared much.

Instead, Brocky gave him a goofy grin, ear-to-ear (whatever passed as ears) all-tooth smile, and offered his hand to help Zechariah up.

"My friend."

#young!zechariah au #fanfiction #HOLY SHIT PART ONE DONE??#fuck im tired #and im going to sleep gn yall #bear cub art things #(i think i need a writing tag)#bear writes

5 notes · View notes

dreamsandroots · 9 months

Text

The View from Down Under

The rarest treasures are often the ones hardest to decipher: that which operates only within the interior of the epistemè, obscured from outsiders. A secret path back home. An anachronous story which changes with the teller’s inflections, their changing dispositions. If there’s one thing the West excelled at (at least since the onset of market libertarianism) it was making its own story accessible. Perhaps accessible is not quite the right word here. Unavoidable might serve more aptly. 24/7 availability, the dream that never sleeps. Excitement in your face, your eyes bleeding, a narrative of Capital Realism that engulfs the horizon. What can you even say about a story that’s so catchy it sticks in your head even as it strangles you? Its jingles and theme tunes ringing in your cells, snaking through your interior circuits? The lens changes: what you see when your eyes become free from the joy of hunger, defined only by the absences of what you can and cannot take. Apocalypse is only a secret whose articulation would certify the ego’s erasure. Scare it into a bullet. The original trick. Fascism’s pull works best behind a pretty face. Gather enough pretty faces, arrange them to cover over your dark corners, and you can divert attention from any atrocity, any factory polluting as it builds its landfill or its bombs. The beautiful ones, the lucky ones. Soon you’ll be made to feel crazy, a paranoid fool, for pointing at anything beneath the surface. The beautiful face becomes the arena within which the ongoing dialectic of division plays indefinitely. A white face, an androgynous face, a coloured face, a trans face, all of them beautiful faces pointing towards the edges of a misplaced sense of self-righteous anger that is tied to our sense of belonging from one moment to the next, and the distinct sense that the battlegrounds of identity have been constructed to keep us looking out to our other in envy. How might we place ourselves in the centre of gravity once again? Don’t they realise how much we have struggled too? The algorithm’s inner logic: a magical formula that predicts and predicates profits on the margins of social dissolution.

But perhaps we’re getting ahead of ourselves here a little. Let’s step back for a moment and think about the dream we had, the one which confuses the hell out of us every time we think on it: not necessarily in a way that leaves us frustrated or exacerbated on the knife’s edge of reason, but rather in the same way that we might imagine it to be pleasing for the plant to think of the different routes it might travel of a day in order to best drink up the sun’s energy. This must be what they mean by ‘quanta’, the superposition of that which is unable to be measured. Nothing in its box. Fixed categories, the static noise of holy conception, trickling and clicking in susurrations and blips through the skin. To stay indefinitely in this gelatinous state of mass, though impossible, must at times seem tempting. To lay snug in our beds comfortably, our needs, our hungers fed intravenously, or via some hare-brained rendition of the digital cloud, must seem something close to a post-lapsarian, pre-eminent paradise. Cycles beget cycles, our bodies growing towards the sun, the moon and various other heavenly bodies, cell by cell. Forget the false binary of dead-cat-living, we are all of us swarms of creatures, balancing tentatively, the species of the brain aware only through a kind of mass-extrapolatory intuition of those in the belly, the mouth, the lungs, the throat, your fingers, the soles of your feet. If only we didn’t have to go to work on Monday, or the day after that. But, I guess every Matrix comes with its own built-in Neo. The ego’s storm clouds. An interior gut punch, a vortex in the pit of your belly. Why can’t we dream forever?

As you walk the dusty streets you realise yourself as the inconsolable deficit. You are white skinned like it’s some kind of blessing. You wear trousers like a man does. You stand up at the urinal to pee, it’s true. Ugly stubble prickles the skin on your face. The chemicals raging in your body, along with the 10y gap in any sense of physical intimacy with another person, have you falling into the embarrassing slobbery drawl of the gaze, staring at what you believe to be the solution to your shortfall: slender, smooth-skinned, expensive clothes, perfect hair, an alluring scent, the ultimate in sublimation, and you have to alleviate yourself from the male fantasy that these angelic beings emerged from heaven’s egg perfectly constructed as if by the hand of God Themself, and that you’re some kind of Odysseus, strapped to the mast of his own ship, navigating through the sublime waters of the sirens. You’re reminded, too, of the cultural boneyard that is Sydney/Gadigal, its highways superimposed on top of sacred spaces, travelling grounds for the one remaining world culture that can provide evidence of continuous cultural practices that date back (according to Neale & Kelly) for at least tens of thousands of years. It’s only in recognition that our problems are skin deep in comparison, the realisation that to approach the problem with the requisite curiosity and open-heartedness of the dreamer, rather than the knower, means also to leave behind the tools you have collected to make sense of the world.

I’m a settler, but aren’t we all? According to various socio-political models which attempt to make sense of, and demystify the automated rollout of self-replicating power structures, what seems most urgent is to develop a sense of class-consciousness, a sense of unification that can come only with the recognition of our shared agency, to halt the ongoing hegemony of market freefall. To examine the relationship of ‘Western’ models of learning and the culturally diverse and variegated systems of knowledge evident in First Nations people throughout the world, feels analogous to the image of a man, dying of thirst who, when approaching the river, thinks immediately that the water is his by right. The cultural work of today is an ongoing labour of building bridges and reforesting places drained of life-force. To recognise our common despairs, but also to find a way to share the joys. Australia’s last hope for cultural identity is to recognise its ongoing systems of oppression, to understand what colonises all of us, to see the pollution of domination, control, fixation, for the mental pollution that it is. If I can approach this task with honesty, sincerity patience and understanding, then maybe one day I’ll be able to say, in sincerity, that I have done the work of an Australian, and I will call it my home.

#writing #colonialism #creative writing #writers on tumblr #writerscommunity

0 notes

v1ralkn1ght · 7 months

Text

Alright I saw a small Discord joke and now need to happy rant about the different ways to simply say that an attack failed. This is gonna take over my next few posts, so enjoy. Also going to put a Read More bar in case y'all just don't wanna listen and keep scrolling:

Right, so I DM'd for a few 5e games, and while the quality was debatable, it definitely helped me appreciate writing for multiple characters in one or two sentences. This is really fucking handy especially for combat, because while we all love flowery descriptions of offing the big evil fucknut, it gets tiring when you do it for every single combat encounter. You really do just have to find ways to keep things brisk, but I feel that it doesn't necessarily mean sacrificing expression of both the players and NPCs.

So let's run with the most common thing for early character combat, where you're basically bitch slapping each other with slightly sharper tree branches. You will inevitably fuck up a roll, on either side of the encounter, and the DM gets to let'cha know it definitely didn't do anything. With a bit of talk beforehand with players, I personally like to characterize both fails and, in some cases, even successes into a few categories:

Negation: This one's probably the most common, especially if you have a paladin or other shield-loving entity involved. Painful end swings, blocking end takes the hit for you, simple and clean, right? Sure, it's serviceable, but doesn't really say anything about the character holding the glorified sheet metal other than they know how to not take a club to the face at high velocity.

Shields are honestly extremely versatile, though, and come in a great many forms in history and gaming. Kite shields can be planted into the ground, letting a stalwart wielder say without words that they refuse to break in the face of your might! Their cousin, the tower shield, has enough space to protect a good many people with one person's arm, and fit nicely in a formation to create a veritable wall! Hell, a heavy enough handle for your big, bulky not-a-penis of a weapon can act as a barrier, enforced by a solid two-handed grip and raw determination.

You can be aggressive in negating hits, too, of course! Bracers and Bucklers are pretty famous for this, in fact - smaller shields like these were used to punch weapon strikes away, and the wooden varieties would often be made specifically to catch weapons inside them and capitalize on the opening made. Bare hands are also pretty good for this, being able to just rush in and grab your enemy's weapon to fuck over their aim or the force behind the hit. Even just preparing your own, more visibly threatening strike can dissuade an attacker via raw intimidation!

#v1-rants #writing #d&d

0 notes

opentoehikingboots · 4 years

Text

nothing is more stressful than repotting a plant i stg

#plants #stress #repotting #i just repotted my orchid i fear for his life #plants are stressful sometimes ngl #like idk if i'm watering you right or not #are you getting enough sun #sir are you ok #luckily i've done pretty well #my venus flytrap kinda iffy tho #i didn't water him enough #i hope he recovers omg #planting #planet earth #save the environment #every plant is a punch in capitalism's face #plant something for clear skin #have plants for a great life

2 notes · View notes

thealtoduck · 3 years

Text

Being from District 1 and being in the 75th Hunger Games with Finnick…

Finnick Odair x Male reader

Warnings: It’s the goddamn hunger games so people dying and lots of violence, talk about two people hooking up.

(A/N: This is based on the movie because i didn’t feel like re-reading the book before writing this)

Growing up in District 1 had it’s advantages because unlike most districts yours has a good relationship with the capital and you are illegally trained for the hunger games so you get an advantage.

…buuuut there is a disadvantage, you are taught the games are just that GAMES and ignore the parts where you might end up traumatised or worse dead.

And that is how you ended up in the games, you volunteered but mostly because you were taught that the games are a good thing and because your parents pressured you into it.

However you ended up winning but not without some mental scars.

You took your winnings and moved into the victors village but without your parents not ever wanting to speak to them again.

You lived peacefully for a while until you didn’t because the capitol decided that for the third quarter quell the tributes would be reaped from the victors of each district.

When you saw that you may or may not have had a nervous brakedown.

Then came the day of the reaping, you told yourself that you were not likely to be picked since District 1 had several other Male victors.

”As for the male tribute… Y/N L/N”

But then you were picked anyway… *cries*

So alongside Cashmere you headed for the Capitol in one of their fancy trains.

You had been allowed to chose your mentors, Cashmere had chosen her brother Gloss. You had picked Augustus Braun, Panem’s favorite son, (he was a character created for promo photos for the movies, the guy who ”plays” him is really hot). He had been your mentor during the year you won so he knew how to work with you and plus he is nice :).

When you arrived at the trainstation there were a huge crowd waiting for you. Augustus advised you to try to appear sad but still wave to the capitol citizens and treat them kindly so they might sympathize with the fact that your back in the games.

You met up with your prep team and they made you strip naked so that they could look you over and make you look presentable.

After they finished they got you into your outfit for the tribute parade.

(A/N: Your outfit is whatever the male version of this would look like)

You were walking towards the chariots for the parade when you heard a catcall whistle and you knew immediately who it was.

You turned around and were met with a almost naked Finnick Odair a familiar sight as you had hooked up the year before while being mentors for the tributes.

”Hello Finnick” you said in a voice implying that you were not in the mood for his flirting.

He caught the hint and the two of you had a normal conversation. You asked how Annie and Mags were doing as you were rather fond of both of them.

He said they were doing fine considering the cicumstances. The two of you talked for a while but eventually Finnick went to try to make Katniss Everdeen uncomfortable for fun.

You climbed in to the chariot and helped Cashmere get up as she was wearing 8 inch stilettos.

After the tribute parade you are escorted to the training center with the rest of your group.

The next day training began, you went directly for the throwing knives which was your preferred weapon.

Then you were approached by Peeta Mellark, last years winner, he asked you to show him how to throw knives. You agreed to show him and you gave him some tips and tricks that you used. He then showed you how to do some simple camouflage.

You liked Peeta he was the kind of person that was hard not to like, unlike his district partner.

You and Cashmere invited Katniss to the place where they showed you how to make hammocks and it was noticable that she was a bit suspicious to be talking to career tributes.

The training days passed by and you did well on your private session but now it was time for the interviews.

When you got out on the stage you threw your arms around Caesar Flickerman as if he was your lover, which in turn got you a ”Awww” from the audience.

You turned on the waterworks, you talked about how much you will miss the capitol citizens for treating you like family and that you regret not reconciling with your parents after a fight you had before you left and not getting to say goodbye to them. It was all lies though but it was enough to fool the audience.

The audience gave you a standing ovation while you joined Cashmere standing in a line above the stage.

The rest of the tributes gave their interviews (Johanna’s was your favorite) and then Peeta during his interview told Caesar that Katniss was pregnant and all hell broke lose.

That evening you were visited by Haymitch and he told you that Peeta had wanted you as an ally and about the rebellion and about their plan to get Katniss out of the arena.

You agreed to the plan.

Before you went in to the arena you said goodbye to your escort, prep team, stylist, Gloss and Augustus.

You also said goodbye Cashmere since you knew you were on different sides in the arena and you said a silent prayer that you wouldn’t have to be the one to kill her.

You were then taken aboard the hovercraft and flown to the arena. You were then escorted to the small elevator thing that takes you the podiums in the arena.

You stood in the elevator waiting anxiously for the game to start. You also realised that you didn’t know who your other allies would be other than Katniss and Peeta.

The podium then started rising until you were inside the arena. Your eyes were blinded by the sunlight and you looked around and saw that the podioum was surrounded by water.

You saw that there were rocky spokes connected to the island where the cornucopia was located.

Then you heard a voice saying ”Let the 75th Hunger Games begin, May the odds be ever in your favor” a voice started counting down from 10 and you prepared yourself to dive in.

A canon went of as the starting signal for the games and you dove right in to the water and swam to one of the rocky spokes and climbed up on it.

You saw someone else had climbed up on it behind you but didn’t care to find out who so you tried to run but they had roughly grabbed a hold of your arm and were trying to drag you back.

You turned around and saw the male tribute from district 9. Without thinking further about it you clenched your fist and punched him in the nose. He let go of you and you started running towards the cornucopia.

You looked around and realised that you were now at a disadvantage from only being held back for a few seconds.

You reached the cornucopia and tried to sneak around it to see who was there but Finnick suddenly appeared around the corner and pointed his trident at you for a second but brought it down as soon as you made eye contact.

”Come on” he said and led you to the weapons. You picked up vest with a bunch of throwing knives attached to it and put it on.

You had put it on just in time as the man from 9 had reached the cornucopia as well. His nose was bleeding from your punch. You got a knife from the vest took aim and threw a knife at his throat, you hit just as intended.

You got an extra leg holster with throwing knives and a regular knife incase needed for close combat.

Finnick told you to stay by the supplies to guard them with Katniss while he looks for Peeta. You nodded at him as he ran off.

Katniss and you stood guard for a while until Finnick returned saying Mags had found him. You and Katniss followed him as he led you out on one of the spokes leading out from the cornucopia.

You saw movement in the water as Peeta was wrestling with a tribute trying to drown him. Finnick dived in to help Peeta, you turned to the cornucopia to check so no one would sneak up behind you.

Soon enough Peeta and Finnick were out of the water and the 5 of you made your way in to the jungle.

You all ran through the difficult jungle terrain except Mags who was carried on Finnick’s back.

After getting far enough from the cornucopia you all kneeled down for a quick rest. You heard more canons going off meaning more people had died.

”I guess were not holding hands anymore” Finnick said with a quick laugh. ”You think that’s funny?” Katniss asked with obvious hostility in her voice. You made quick eye contact with Peeta basically saying ”Fuck, they are going to be fighting”.

”Every time that canon goes of it’s music to my ears, i don’t care about any of them” Finnick answered. ”Good to hear” Katniss said pulling out a machete from her quiver. ”Wanna face the career pack alone? What would Haymitch say?” Finnick asked teasingly.

”Haymitch isn’t here” Katniss stated and there was silence for a moment until Peeta said ”Let’s keep moving” and you all got up and continued moving through the jungle.

Peeta walked in front using the machete to cut plants and vines out of the way, Finnick was behind him carrying Mags, you were behind Finnick and Katniss was behind you.

You noticed Katniss stopping behind you as you turned to see if anything was wrong she yelled ”Peeta! NO!” and right behind you there was a bang and you were knocked to the ground by Peeta flying backwards.

You sat up and saw Katniss crawling over to Peeta repeating his name slowly as he lay motionless on the ground. You then heard her say in a panicy voice ”He’s not breathing”, Finnick ran over to him and started doing mouth to mouth resuscitation. You crawled over to see what was happening.

After a while he woke up again and you all started to move slowly but Katniss was now in the lead, she threw small rocks at the barrier so that you could navigate how close you were to it.

Katniss told the 4 of you to wait while she climbed up a tree to see your location and if she could find fresh water. When she got down she told you that you were on the edge of the arena and that she couldn’t find any water.

Finnick suggested that you should set up camp and sleep, he said he could take first watch to guard the others to which Katniss disagreed which in turn made Finnick upset since he literally saved Peeta.

Honestly you were tired of both of them so you rolled your eyes and walked away to find somewhere decent to sleep.

You found a spot close to Mags where you laid down and shut your eyes but that didn’t last long as you heard the anthem playing and you looked up and saw the faces of the fallen tributes.

When you saw the face of the man from district 9 you felt ashamed. You wondered if he had a lover or children at home who had to watch him bleed to death from a knife to the throat.

You turned around so you lay on your other side and your y/c/e met with Mags kind eyes and she gave you a small smile as if she had read you mind which you returned shyly.

(A/N: I had to stop a second just for some Mags appreciation because she’s one of my favorite characters in the hunger games universe.)

You closed your eyes again trying to sleep but you then heard something hit the ground you sat up and looked to Katniss and Finnick who had gone to inspect the noise.

It turned out to be a sponsor gift, you stood up and walked over to them. Katniss held a small silvery thing. ”What is it?” Finnick asked. ”It’s from Haymitch…… I think it’s a spile” Katniss answered.

”A what?” Both you and Finnick asked as Katniss stood up and found a tree and started banging on the spile with a rock hitting it in to the tree.

You all waited for a moment but soon water started trickling down from the spile. Katniss caught some in her mouth and told the others to get some, first Peeta got some, then Finnick and the you.

You were on you knees infront of the spile, you got a mouthful of water. Finnick walked up beside you with a small smile and said ”As much as i like seeing you on your knees, can you move over a little? I need some more water for Mags”. You laughed a little and moved aside.

”Seems like someone has gotten his wittiness back” you said and Finnick gave a small laugh and started filling a leaf he had shaped like a bowl for Mags.

After that you went to your previous resting place and laid down to sleep again. You were woken up at some point by what sounded like a gong and the sound of lightning but you managed to get back to sleep.

You were woken up by the sound of Katniss screaming, you quickly got up and pulled out your close combat knife. You saw no one but Katniss, she was laying on the ground whimpering and there was a closing in behind her.

”Run! Run! The fog is poisonus” she yelled you helped Mags get up as Finnick crouched down to get her up on his back. When she was safely up you started running following Katniss and Peeta.

You passed Katniss and Peeta as being quick was sort of your specialty.

It was hard to know where to go as almost everywhere you turned the fog seemed to be coming closer. You heard falling behind you and saw that Katniss had fallen over but Peeta had helped her up. Then a little bit after that Peeta fell over and Katniss helped him up, you turned around to come to their aid but you heard Finnick screaming and saw him falling over.

You ran to Finnick to help him get up but by the time you got there he was already up and he had gotten Mags back up on his back. You grabbed him by the arm and helped him away from the fog. You and Finnick saw that Peeta had fallen over once again from exposure to the fog.

You and Finnick ran to him and Katniss. ”I can’t carry him, Peeta please” she said with tear stained eyes. You tried to help carry Peeta but it was no use you weren’t strong enough.

Behind you heard Finnick saying ”Mags? Mags?” You turned around and saw Mags walking right into the fog (like the boss she is).

(R.I.P Queen, both the actress and character)

”MAGS!” Finnick screamed and the came the sound of canon. You grabbed Finnick by the arm and Katniss told him that we need to leave.

Finnick helped pick up Peeta as you picked up Peeta’s machete and started cutting away plants that were in the way. The others staggerd away from the fog, you ran to Katniss side to try help her keep up.

You feel the fog touching you back as immense pain shoot through you whole body and then the 4 of you fell… not because the fog though but because there was a huge drop that you hadn’t noticed.

When you land you just lay on the ground twitching and flinching from the pain.

After a while you hear Katniss saying ”The water, the water helps”. You tried to get up but you body was like on lockdown. You hear them helping Finnick into the water, Finnick tries to let out a scream but gets water in his mouth.

Peeta comes to you and drags you up into a sitting positon saying ”Come on” as if he’s talking to a child but it was strangely comforting. He then pulls you into the pond making you let out a scream from a sudden sharp pain but the pain slowly starts to fade away.

The group takes a little brake now to rest and you can’t help but to whisper a little ”thank you” to Mags.

You then hear Katniss saying to Finnick ”I’m sorry about Mags”. Finnick answered by saying ”She was never gonna make it….so”.

Finnick then turned his attention to something behind Katniss, you turned around and saw some sort of monkey like creature staring at you, whatever they were they didn’t look friendly so you pulled out your combat knife in one hand and a throwing one in the other.

All 4 of you stood in the little pond surrounded by the mutts, you were all waiting for one to attack. ”Get to the beach” Katniss said and turned towards a path that lead towards the cornucopia but the mutts started looking more aggressive.

One tried to jump at Katniss but was cut down by Peeta which made more start to attack.

You weren’t really that well equipped to deal with animals but you tried your best. A mutt tried to jump at you but you kicked it in the face and threw a knife at it.

Another one ran towards you so threw a knife at it’s arm making it shriek in pain and you ran over and stabbed it with the combat knife.

”We need to get to the beach” Peeta said as he and Katniss started moving in the beaches directon, you started following him and Katniss and made sure Finnick was keeping up.

You made you way through the difficult terrain while trying to avoid the mutts. You did your best to hit then with your knives but the didn’t pack enough of a punch to kill them unless they were hit in sensitive areas.

You were tackled by a mutt which made you fall to the ground. It crawled onto you about to maul your face off but you stabbed it in the stomach and twisted the knife.

You threw it’s dead body off of you and got up, you saw Katniss and Peeta carrying someones body to the beach, you turned your head back and saw Finnick fending of the mutts. Your mind raced for a second if Finnick is there and Peeta and Katniss are fine the who’s body was that.

You ran over to Finnick who was slowly making his way to the beach backwards with the mutts following him, only held back by his trident. You stood by his side swinging your blade at any mutt that comes to near you two.

Finnick then whispered to you ��At my signal grab my hand”, you nodded.

”Now” he said and you grabbed his hand and the two of you started sprinting towards the beach while the mutts chased yoy, when you got near enough you and Finnick dove on to the beach sand.

You and Finnick quickly got up and pointed your weapons at the mutts that where now on the edge of the jungle where the beach began. You then heard a canon going off and the mutts then started making their way into the jungle once more.

You put you knife in the holster at your leg and then turned to Finnick. You threw your arms around him in a hug, Finnick put his big arms around and you leaned you head against the older males shoulder.

It was hard putting a label on yours and Finnick’s relationship. You had met during part of your victory tour in district 4, you were attending a dinner in your honor.

You had excused yourself to go to the public bathroom during the dinner. You had no need to actually use the bathroom. You just needed to get away from the people who had celebrated the fact that you had killed people.

You started having a bit of a nervous breakdown in the bathroom, you were crying, splashing water in your face trying to calm down but you felt like you needed to scream.

One of the toilet stalls had opened and Finnick steped out. He went to the sink to wash his hands and while doing so he noticed your red eyes and trembling hands and he asked if you were okay.

And you spilled everything to him and told him how you were feeling, he put an arm around you, he told you he somtimes felt like that as well and told you how he usually copes with it.

He had told you that if you didn’t want to finish the dinner he could go out and tell everyone you weren’t feeling well and have you escorted back to the train.

But you said you wanted to try to get through the dinner as long as he was there to help you. He agreed to be there with you and you managed to get through the whole thing.

After that Finnick was basically your bestie and you guys would come to each other for emotional support.

And last year during the 74th hunger games while you both were in the capitol, you had been hanging out at his apartment the capitol give the victors while they visit for the games.

While hanging out things got a bit steamy between the two of you and you ended up hooking up, the day after the two of you kinda acted like it never happened and things got a bit awkward between you and him.

But being back in to the arena had stirred up feelings for him you had buried. While in the arena most people will latch onto whatever makes them feel safe and Finnick made you feel safe.

You finally let go of Finnick and you noticed a hover craft picking up the body Peeta and Katniss had taken in to the water. Finnick told you he was gonna go try to catch some fish food, you nodded at this and walked over to Katniss and Peeta.

”Who body was it they picked up?” you asked. ”The female morphling” Peeta answered in a saddend voice. You sat down in the sand, the 4 of you had almost died 3 times (+ 1 for Peeta) in less than 24 hours and it was exhausting.

Finnick had managed to catch a fish and found some oysters that you were now eating. Peeta found a pearl and gave it to Katniss.

You then heard a scream coming from the jungle, ”That’s new” Peeta said and you heard a thundering noise.

Out of the jungle came a huge wave of water and you heard a canon going off. The wave was so big it washed up on the beach.

You then saw a hover craft lifting away the body.

After it had flown away you heard Katniss say ”Someone is hear”. You immediately looked in the direction Katniss had been looking and saw another tribute on the beach and two other tributes emerging from the jungle, you backed up slowly.

”Johanna?” Finnick whispered and ran out of hiding towards Johanna shouting her name, ”Finnick!” she yelled back and the two embraced each other. You made your way towards them and waved Johanna.

Johanna told the 4 of you how she, Wiress, Beetee and Blight, her district partner, had been wandering the jungle when it had started raining blood on them to the point where they could barely see and were choking on it. Then blight had hit the forcefield and passed away.

Wiress was stumbling around murmering the words ”Tick-tock” to herself, Wiress tried to get Johanna’s attention but she ignored her.

”What’s wrong with her?” Katniss asked referring to Wiress. ”She’s in shock, dehydration isn’t helping” Beetee answered and the asked ”You have fresh water?”

”We can get some” Katniss answered as Johanna had started getting fed up with Wiress saying ”Tick-Tock” to her. ”Listen stop it!” Johanna said loudly while grabbing a hold of Wiress.

”Hey! Get of her” Katniss yelled as Wiress fell to the ground. Katniss stromed passed you and started fighting with Johanna. ”Hey!, what are you doing” Johanna asked as Katniss got up in her face but before things could escalate Peeta and Finnick had pulled them apart.

You got the spile and hit it in to a tree so that the others could get freshwater. You took a big leaf and shaped it like a bowl and got some water for Beetee who was working with some sort of wire. Katniss and Wiress then came excitedly and said that the arena was a clock with different obstacles every hour.

You all decided to go to the cornucopia to stock up on weapons, you had decided to get something more lethal than just knives just in case something comes up.

Katniss was trying to go through what happens during every hour that we know off. When you arrived at the Cornucopia you refilled your knife supply and picked up a nice sword. The others were drawing up a map of the zones and the drew the threats we knew about tsunami, lightning, blood rain, fog and mutts.

Then came a loud gasp from Wiress who was being stabbed in the back by the male tribute from district 10 (you know since your here instaed of Gloss). Katniss was quick to shoot an arrow hitting him right in the chest killing him almost instantly.

Another figure had appeared it was Cashmere she had a knife in her hand. She was on her way to attack Katniss but Johanna pushed her out of the way and plunged her axe right in Cashmere’s chest.

Right as she hit the ground there came clang of metal against metal and you saw Brutus attacking Finnick and Peeta. Enobaria then suddenly appears and throws a knife at Finnick cutting his arm. You quickly draw a knife throwing at Enobaria cutting her shoulder.

Enobaria and Brutus start running away from the cornucopia. You, Katniss and Johanna run to follow them but as you do the island the cornucopia is located on starts spining and you all fall to the ground.

You take out a knife in one hand and stab it in to the ground to try to keep you from sliding of the island, you manage to get a good grip with your hand as well.

You hear struggling behind you and see Johanna struggling to keep a hold of Katniss’ hand, she lost her grip and Katniss fell into the raging water.

The island then stopped spining and Katniss climbed up on one of the spokes and started coughing up water. Johanna and Peeta checked that she was okay.

She was fine and your group left the island and went back to the beach, you all sat down on the beach to stratergize. Other than the group there was 3 people left in the games Chaff, Brutus and Enobaria.

They were all outnumbred so they probably won’t try to attack us. Johanna suggested that we hunt them down but then you heard a scream ”Ahhh!!! Katniss,Help me!!!” which made Katniss scream in return ”Prim!!! Prim!!!” as she ran into the jungle.

You all ran to follow her Finnick was in front you were right behind him but then you hit something almost like when you run in to a glass door, it was an invisible forcefield. ”Y/n!Are you okay?” You heard Peeta saying as you sat up.

”Yeah” you said as he helped you up. You tried to touch the forcefield, it was as solid as a brick wall. Soon Katniss and Finnick came running back with a bunch of birds following them but they couldn’t get through the forcefield and were stuck on the other side.

You had to wait an hour until the birds flow away and the forcefield disappeared. You ran over to Finnick to check on him. ”Are you okay? You asked putting a hand on his shoulder. ”Yeah, i’m fine” he said weakly.

You the heard Johanna say something about ”Riots in the damn capitol” she then yelled ”Hey! How does that sound Snow! What if we.. What if we set your backyard on fire?! You know you can’t put everybody in here!!!”. You were all looking at Johanna speechless at her open disrespect of President Snow.

”What?… they can’t hurt me, there’s no one left that i love” Johanna said and walked away to get Katniss some water. That left you feeling bad for Johanna, sure she may be a bit rude at times but she’s nowhere near as bad as some people make her out to be.

You helped Finnick stand up and your group made their way back to the beach once more. Finnick went and sat down in the shallow part of the water. You were torn whether you should go to him or not, maybe he wanted to be alone.

But then you remembered how he had been there for you during your victory tour, so you went out into the water and sat down beside him. ”Did you hear her?” You asked referring to Annie.

Finnick gave you a small nod. You didn’t know what more to say, but you didn’t need to cause Finnick started speaking ”I also heard you”. You gave him a questioning look ”Really?”

”Yeah, even though in knew you were there right infront of me, it was still torture to have to hear you screaming my name for help, I had to open my eyes just to check that you were okay” Finnick said turning his attention from the water to you. You grabbed his hand gently and said ”I’m okay, thanks to you”. You and Finnick’s heads were leaning close to eachother but then came a shout ”Finnick!” ”Y/n” it was Johanna she waved for you to come over.

You and Finnick got up and walked over to the others and the group made a plan to use the wire Beetee had gotten to hopefully electrecute the careers.

A few hours went by and the sun started to go down. You were sitting in the wet sand watching Finnick swinging around his trident lightly. Then you heard the noise of something hitting the ground near you, you turned around.

A little bit inside the jungle you saw a silver capsule, you went into the junge and got it. You opened it and knew immediately what it was. You turned to the others and yelled at them to come over. You showed them that you had gotten bread from district 1.

You gave everyone their fair share of the bread, ”District 1 is known for using cinnamon and huckleberries in their bread” you informed them though the only one who actually seemed to care what your district used in their bread was Peeta.

Then it was time to leave to go to the lightning tree and once again you were making your way through the thick jungle terrain.

Then you heard the anthem playing and you looked up in the sky to see the pictures of the fallen tributes. You felt a bit sad when you saw Cashmere up there and realised even if you got out of the arena Gloss would kill you.

But it felt worse seeing Wiress and Mags up there. They had both been very kind people and they shouldn’t have been in here in the first place. You felt something inside you almost as if it was catching fire (A/N:😉) a new hatred for the capitol.

You continued moving until you reached the lightning tree and Beetee started doing his thing and wrapping the tree with the bronze colored wire. He then told you, Katniss and Johanna to go with the spool of wire to the beach, throw it into the water and go to the tree in the 2 o’clock sector.

”I’m gonna go with them as a guard” Peeta said probably not wanting to leave Katniss. ”Nonono, your staying here to protect me… and the tree”. Beetee opposed. ”No i need to go with her” Peeta said stubbornly.

”There are two careers out there, i need two guards” Beetee said. ”Finnick can protect just fine on his own” Peeta said and you and Finnick gave eachother a knowing look. Then Katniss butted in saying ”Yeah, why can’t Finnick, Y/n and Johanna stay with you and Peet and I will take the chord”.

”You all agreed to keep me alive till midnight, correct?” Beetee asked in a annoyed tone. ”It’s his plan we all agreed to it” Johanna said clearly starting to get annoyed as well. ”Is there a problem here?” Finnick asked. ”Excellent question” Beetee said as you were all staring down Peeta and Katniss.

”No, there’s no problem” Katniss said in a defeated manner and walked over to Peeta and gave him a kiss. After they finished you said ”Good idea” and walked over to Finnick and kissed him, you could feel him kiss back and put his arms around your waist.

After you pulled away you said with a weak smile ”You know just incase we never see eachother again”. ”Alright, let’s go” Johanna said. You walked over to her and put an arm around her shoulder saying jokingly ”Incase your feeling left out i can give you a quick kiss too”, Johanna only rolled her eyes but let out a small chuckle.

You, Johanna and Katniss made your way to the beach once more the same way you came. After a while of walking Johanna said ”Come on, i wanna put as much distance between me and this beach as possible, frying is not how i wanna go” but then came another sound from the spool it had stopped putting out wire.

”There’s something…” Katniss said and looked in the direction the wire came from but saw nothing then something pulled the wire and cut it off. Katniss immediately threw aside the spool and pulled out an arrow but Johanna grabbed the spool and hit her over the head with it.

You were kinda lost on what to do but Johanna got you to kneel down beside her and took your combat knife and started cutting up Katniss’ arm open, then it dawned on you the arm with the tracker, the plan to get Katniss out was set into motion.

You grabbed Katniss arm so that she wouldn’t try to fight it, Johanna smeared blood on Katniss’ throat to make her look like she was dying. ”Stay down” she whispered to Katniss and sat up and threw her axe against Brutus and Enobaria who were on their way. ”Come on” Johanna said to you and you followed her as you ran with careers chasing you.

It was hard to keep up with Johanna in this terrain. You then felt a sudden sharp pain in your side and saw that you had gotten a cut that was now bleeding, you guessed that Enobaria must have thrown a knife. You looked up to see where Johanna had gone but she must not have noticed you slowing down because you couldn’t see her.

You turned around and saw that only Enobaria was on your trail now. You drew your sword just in time to deflect another knife coming your way, she drew her sword as well.

The sound of clashing swords came as she made a slash at you which you blocked. You went back and forward with her for a while slashing, stabbing, cutting but neither managed to kill the other.

Enobaria then made stab at your hand cutting it open so that blood started spilling out, you tried to fight with one hand but she easily disarmed you. You turned around and started running since there wasn’t much else you could do.

You managed to put some fair distance between you and her, not enough to get rid of her but enough so you could draw a knife and throw it at the hand she kept her sword in which caused her to drop it but that didn’t stop her as she drew a knife from her vest.

You did the same bracing yourself for her. The two of you pounced at eachother like tigers, colliding in the air and laying on the ground wrestling for dominance, she had gotten on top of you and tried to stab you but you grabbed the hand she kept her knife in and used your other hand to grab her hair.

You pulled it with all your strength and managed to roll over so that you were on top of her, you held her down and punched her across the face. She still managed to grab you and roll you over so she was on top of you again and she the showed you her fang like teeth.

She was starting to lean down probably about to rip your throat out with her bare teeth but something had distracted her, you seized your moment and noticed you were right beside a steep slope. So with all the power in your body you grabbed a hold of her and threw her off of you and down the slope.

You got up quickly and looked at what had distracted her and saw that it was a blue glowing wire pointing right up into the sky or what used to be the sky but was now just a gray dome.

Your brain put some kind of scenario together that this was part of the plan so you started making you way towards the source of the glowing wire but it was hard you were still bleeding and you were exhausted from your fight with Enobaria.

You staggerd towards the lightning tree but your body couldn’t take anymore and you collapsed, you looked up at the gray dome and saw that it was starting to fall apart. That made you smile and you thought to yourself ”Thank you, Mockingjay” and then it faded to black.

(A/N: Don’t worry you didn’t die at the end, but please give this a like or reblog it took like a lot of time write and i really tried my best, there might be some grammatical errors in there but deal with it)

#finnick odair x male reader #finnick odair x male!reader #the hunger games x male reader #the huger games x male!reader #finnick odair #x male reader #x male!reader #x male reader smut #the hunger games #male reader #male!reader

502 notes · View notes

dreadwulf · 3 years

Text

prompt #1: The Green Knight

(Warning: Major Character Death. Not the Major Character you think. Be warned.)

The Green Chapel stands still and silent when the Golden Knight arrives.

Once he had expected a fine cathedral to await him at the of his journey, but by now he is unsurprised to find a crumbled ruin overgrown with ivy. Only the stone walls remain of this “chapel”. The sunken paving stones admit dirt and weeds between them enough that it is barely distinguishable from the forest floor, and the roof is long since fallen in. Everywhere it is overgrown with thick green leaves and vines, and surrounded by a canopy of trees that opens only enough to admit a slice of night sky directly above.

Ser Jaime Lannister enters watchfully, his hand on the hilt of his sword.

The Green Knight is nearly invisible to him at first: concealed in greenery, grown into the landscape as though part of it. The bark of his skin is encrusted with moss, leaving no visible gap between himself and the plants around him. Judging from the growth, the Knight has not moved in a long, long while.

Has he stood exactly here for the entire year, waiting for him? It looks more like a statue, or a tree carving. Something long abandoned. Much longer than a single year.

“Ser Knight,” he announces, “I have arrived per our agreement.”

Silence.

There is only him here, and a tree that looks only a little like a man.

He is early, Ser Jaime realizes. Will be it dawn of the day, or the very hour of their meeting? He may be here for some time. It will be hours to dawn, and it had been another sundown after that when the Green Knight had ridden into Robert’s court on his enormous steed.

One year hence, the Knight had said. Well, at least he is not late.

The pre-dawn hours are quiet here, and the grove is peaceful. The trees overhead open out onto a pretty sprinkling of stars, and all the noise of the forest and the brook which has lead him here has faded away. He can see why the locals call this the Green Chapel. It is the sort of place that encourages one to pray, and to contemplate, at least if one is given to introspection and piety.

Which he is usually not.

The Golden Knight quickly grows restless. Waiting is not a skill of his. He is impatient by nature, impetuous and impulsive. Faced with delay he will rush things ahead, or abandon his course. Unless, as in this case, he has no choice but to wait, and then he will be overcome with unease.

He paces. His fingers twitch. His gaze darts around, landing on this and that.

There is no sign of movement from the Green Knight.

If he had not seen him walking and talking, he might assume this to be only a sculpture, and not a living being. He might wonder if he had been tricked, and if some unseen enemy hovered nearby laughing at his predicament. But he has seen the Green Knight up close, and ran him through with his own blade, and watched as the great gnarled hands pulled the greatsword from his own breast as casually as a thorn from his finger, and tossed the weapon aside as though it were a child’s plaything.

His hands curl around the same greatsword at his belt. He has carried it for a year, this sword. It was his prize for accepting the Green Knight’s challenge, and ostensibly he is here to return it. When he does, the knight will return him the same blow, and stab him through the heart.

Was it worth it? What, after all, did he do with his fine sword?

Ser Jaime sighs and sits on the wet ground. He can grow no more muddy and disheveled than he is already. He left King’s Landing in his extravagant golden armor, wearing his lion’s helm, and riding the finest horse in his stable. But he arrives in the Green Chapel on foot, with no helm, dressed in shabby clothing and battered bits of armor. Even his golden hair is shorn, and only a thin growth of hair remains of his famous golden curls.

The only thing of value remaining to him is the sword. And to be quite honest, the Green Knight is welcome to it. If he could, he would exchange it for something much more valuable that he had found, and then lost, along the way.

It had taken many weeks to get him here. There were some diversions - misadventures, a strange episode in a Keep, and a good deal of wandering around lost - but he has come a very long way from Robert’s Court to find himself here. He had managed the journey only with the help of his squire.

The girl had joined him on the road on the very first day. She was part of the crowd that had followed him from the gates, those knight-hopefuls who so frequently followed his footsteps around the city. Most wanted some of his glory, hoped for it to spill onto them by mere proximity. Some wanted merely to see him meet his fate, others to be part of that tale if they could. But there was very little glory in this journey. They had been beset by bandits, wild animals, bad weather, and strange side-tracks from almost the very start

There had been six, even eight of them at a time, during the ride through the Westerlands, but as he traveled further and further from the capital and the weather worsened their number dwindled, and by the tenth night there was only her. Her name was Brienne. If she had another he has already forgotten it.

She was a strange girl, ungainly large, and dressed all in armor, in imitation of a knight. She had a face like rotten fruit, softly misshapen. Her straw-blonde hair, ruddy and pox-marked skin, and stubborn pout completed the picture. Her very presence proved subtly irritating. If a maid cannot be beautiful she might at least keep herself out of sight; or else be a servant, who are barely women to begin with.

His followers quickly decided to make a servant of her. This did not go well. Ser Jaime came upon her fighting three of the men on the third night. One of them had blood streaming from his nose already, another was sitting on the ground looking dazed from a blow to the head. The last was seemingly unfazed by the fate of the other two, and Ser Jaime observed him take a good punch to the chin that left him spitting out teeth. They were trying to steal her supper, she said. The girl should be cooking for us all, the men said.

“She is my squire”, Ser Jaime told them, deciding upon it at that very moment. “She will cook supper for only me.”

“Like hell I will,” the ungrateful wench spat at him.

Ser Jaime raised an eyebrow. “Do you wish to be a knight or not? First you must be a squire.”

She did at that. She did wish it, very much. He can see it in her eyes -- striking blue eyes, with a determined gaze.

Brienne did cook his supper, the next night, over the campfire. Not very well, and he did not insist again. But she also tended his armor and sword, and that she did very well indeed. She handled his greatsword with tremendous respect and care, such that it touched him to see. He had long since stopped being impressed by the blade, after carrying it for a year.

Brienne proved a loyal squire, if not the most typical one. When wolves attacked she proved herself courageous, stood herself well in front of older and more experienced men. When there was work to be done she would be first to do it, and without being asked: gathering firewood, tending the horses. Drudgery she avoided, but practical, necessary things she performed without complaint.

She had very blue eyes. Sky eyes, clear and bright. He would have liked to look at them, except that she would be looking back, and that seemed to frighten her. She did not like to look him in the face. A shy maid, for all her armor and prickly temperament. He liked to tease her, and tell bawdy jokes with the other men until her face turned a pleasant pink.

A skirmish with the Brave Companions lost three of his would-be-knights and all of their horses,and it lead to their capture for a brief time. When they managed to escape, they were left traveling afoot, and without their supplies. His other followers drifted off then, losing their taste for adventure. Only the girl remained, and walked beside him along the road North uncomplaining through the long days ahead.

She was good with a blade, better than most. Not so good as Ser Jaime, who had a prodigious talent. But on the occasions he challenged her to spar with him, she got his blood up and roaring in a way he had not felt since he was a young man himself, and all his adventures before him.

She was kind. Too reserved to be gregarious, but generous in spirit. She took pity on every foundling, every poor farmer and milkmaid they encountered along the way. She wanted to help them, rescue them all; if he had not restrained her they would have been fighting for the honor of each individual cow from the Westerlands to the Neck. She was much disappointed that they hadn’t. What is a knight for, if not that?

She would learn, as he once had. The Knights of Robert’s Kingdom were more tarnished than a starry-eyed squire suspected. Heroes and legends in tales were only men in the flesh, and men with a bit of money and renown all went the same way. Given the best of everything they would indulge themselves, would grow greedy, would came to expect what had once been freely given. They fought not for gods and country but for glory, and mainly fought each other. They plundered wealth and women, sat by roaring fires, went slow, went soft, forgot hunger and killing cold.

Honor was a facade, nothing more. To become a knight was to learn it. It made him glad she would never be knighted, and fail that lesson.

“Entertain me, squire,” he said to her as they rode side-by-side, needling her. “I have heard all of the songs and stories of this land, and they bore me. Tell me a tale of yourself, Squire Brienne. What adventures set you on this course to become a knight?”

She bowed her head. “I have no tales to tell, my lord. It is only a wish, and an aspiration. But I have no adventures but the one we are on now. But you, my lord, are a famous knight, and must have many stories to tell. I would be honored to hear them from your own lips.”

Ser Jaime had hundreds of tales. He has boasted of his adventures to innumerable audiences as they looked on him admiringly, the great Golden Knight. Wins at tourney, duels with other knights, riding to war for King Robert. But for some reason, as he turned them over in his mind, he discarded each of his favorite stories one by one. He did not want to tell them now; those stories are not for her.

“I also have no tales to tell,” he said.

“Are you not on a quest, my lord?” She looked over at him quizzically, her blue eyes innocent. “I hear tell you are riding to the Green Chapel in the north…”

“I am, and to meet the Green Knight. But even I am not so bold as to tell that tale when I do not yet know its ending. But it sounds like you could, Squire Brienne.”

Again she frowned at him for that title. But she did know the bare outlines of the story, how the strange Green Knight had rode into King Robert’s court and invited the bravest and boldest of his knights to face him in battle, to strike a single blow and receive a blow in return, and for it they would gain his greatsword as a prize. How the Golden Knight had taken up the challenge, and in a blow of great talent and precision stabbed the Golden Knight through the heart, finding the weakest point in his armor on a single try. But instead of falling down dead, the Green Knight had easily pulled the blade from his own chest and mounted his horse. He told the Golden Knight to meet him in one year at the Green Chapel, where he would return his blow.

“And I see you do not hesitate to keep your word,” Brienne concluded the tale. “You are as bold and brave as all the stories say. But what will you do when you get there?”

“Fight him, I suppose.” Ser Jaime’s hand tensed around the ruby-encrusted pommel of his borrowed sword.

“Ser?” She blinked back at him in confusion.

“What, you expected I would meekly bow my head and be murdered? Of course not.” Ser Jaime’s shoulders shook. “Twas not a fair bargain, when he has such dark magic that he can take a sword through the heart and survive. I have no such magic, and it isn’t a fair exchange.”

“But you did not have to strike a deathblow. By the bounds of the agreement you might have only scratched him, and taken only a scratch in return.”

Well, yes. In hindsight, that would have been wiser. If he had taken the time to think it over, he might have put that together. But by nature he rarely takes that time.

“He was a large and fearsome Knight, and I thought only to prevent the return blow. Of course if I had known he would survive it I would have acted differently. I know it now. And when I see the Knight this time I will fight him with everything I have, and he will fight me with everything He has, and we will see who is the victor.”

“But you made a promise…” She sounded faintly disappointed, and it irritated him greatly.

“It was a trick, girl. A trick to snare a knight by his honor. Would you have me die for a trick? What good will that serve? No, I will keep my appointment as promised, but he will have to work to land his blow against me. I’ll have my skill and my wit to defend me, as he had his magic.”

“Are you not afraid, Ser?”

“Afraid to fight? Never. It will be a fine duel, perhaps the finest of my life, and I am eager for it. It will be the battle that will make my legend, the kind that songs are sung of, and I look forward to that.”

Brienne said that she hoped to see it, and let the matter lie.

She did not see it, of course. They came to the Crossroads instead.

An inn stood at the crossroads, and cast-offs from the Riverlands sheltered there. Orphans and strays. Jaime and Brienne arrived only long enough to see a great many helpless faces before bandits came riding, meaning to plunder the kitchens, and carry off the women and children.

Jaime told the girls to run away as best they could, and aimed to do the same. If they were quick about it, the raiders couldn’t catch them all.

Brienne, on the other hand, meant to defend them. They would not survive alone in the forest, she said, and if the bandits took away the food, the little ones would starve.

“Better the bandits take them then, one or the other,” he said quickly, tugging at her. “But we had best retreat. We will not manage another fight in our condition, and not without more men.”

This was entirely reasonable, to him; better knights than he had often advised the same. There was no glory in failure, and certainly none in a pointless death in the middle of nowhere.

“No.” Brienne grew taller under his grasp, and would not be moved. “What good is a knight if he will not defend the innocent?”

“You stupid girl.” He holds her by the shoulders. “There is nothing you and I alone can do against so many men, no matter how skilled you are with a blade. They will surround us and cut us down -- it won’t even buy any time for your orphans. The best we can do is live to fight another day.”

“Someone must do something,” she says stubbornly. “I will not run.”

“Not to no avail! A battle is bravery, but this is suicide. It’s foolish, meaningless. It will make no difference whether you intervene or not - either way the women are taken and the children are killed. You will only add another body.”

“Someone must fight for them,” she insists. “Even if there is no hope. I am not enough, but if there is no one else, then it will be me.”

With that, she had shoved him in the larder, with a sudden and ferocious strength, and barred the door.

“Let me free, you stupid child!” He slammed his weight into the door sharply with his shoulder, enraged.

He could hear her through the door, her voice steady and clear.

“Someone must fight for them. If there is no one else, then it will be me.”

“Damn you,” he swore at her. “Open the door and I will fight with you. Two against a dozen is better odds than one. Open the door!”

“You have an appointment to keep,” she said, and then there was silence.

Jaime could not see what happened after that, but he could hear it. He could hear the disdainful laughter of the brighands, and the drawing of many blades. He could hear for a time the blades clashing, and much shouting, and one unfamiliar cry of pain, and for a brief moment he was hopeful that she might prevail. She was a talented swordfighter. If they fought her one at a time he had no doubt she could best them.

He could tell, even without seeing, that they did not. The fight turned, became a slaughter. He heard a single cry that he knew in his gut was Brienne, taking a blow she would not survive. There came more noise then, more steel and blows, and then the screams of the women and children being dragged from the Inn.

He screamed too. He wept, and clutched at his useless greatsword in a rage, wanting to throw himself through the door and impale himself on them like an arrow, these animals who would dare to touch a true knight. None of them seemed to hear him, or proved interested in the larder.

He didn’t know how long he had been left sitting there on the floor, with tears on his face and the earthy smell of raw meat weighting him down in the cool darkness. He waited for one of them, any of them, to remember him in the kitchens and come back, but no one did, and that was how he knew that no one remained. He wondered if he would be left there to rot. To moulder away with the bits of cheese and bread that remained there until he was nought but bones and a borrowed sword.

Eventually, quietly, a small boy with enormous eyes unbarred the door, having emerged from his hidey-hole only hours after the vicious intruders had left. Seeing Jaime huddled in the dark, he fled again and hid himself away in the Inn.

Jaime emerged into the twilight reluctantly. When he looked down the road, he imagined he could see them. The prisoners being taken away in the back of some wagon, women and children and women who were really children still, huddled together and weeping, down the long road and away. It was all for nothing, all of this. The brigands had taken them anyway.

There was no glory in this defeat. There was only a bloodstreaked trench in the mud where a terrible battle occurred, and in the middle of it a sad heap of metal. She was unrecognizable there, cut to pieces. Only a few strands of pale blonde hair remained to know her by.

The blacksmith’s armory had implements enough to break the cold ground. He dug a hole right beside the crossroads while the rain bucketed down on him. His chest hurt from the strangled sob caught in it. He put her in the hole and blanketed her again with the mud. If there had been flowers anywhere in that season in all the land he would have found them and laid them there above her grave. One day, he hoped, grass would grow.

It was a meaningless gesture, and made no difference to the blue-eyed girl. But it meant something to Jaime.

It was not meaningless to them, the shivering children and the sad-faced women riding away in the wagons. They had looked back, mournfully, at the place in the road where her body lay. Looked back down the long road, into the distance, through the rain and the trees and the tramping feet of the bandits’ horses and out of sight, and they kept looking. They would look back long after the rain and wind had wiped away any traces of what had happened there. They would not forget. When the enemy came for them, someone took up a blade in their cause. Someone thought they mattered. Someone thought they were worth dying for. They did not face their fate alone.

When evil comes, so long as at least one person stands against it, there is still some light left in the world.

He left the shovel there in the road and went back to the Inn. It took some time to locate the boy and persuade him to come out of the trunk where he had hidden himself. He carried the boy with him North to the next village, where he left him wordlessly at the Sept, and turned North again, alone.

The rain never stops now. The ground is crusted with snow and the air is wet and mossy and somehow the rains never wash anything away. It only soaks into the dirt and grime and ice and blood and weighs it down. Makes it heavier. Makes everything impossibly heavy.

There are more strange things that happen to him then: how the road curves and wanders beneath his feet and doubles him back to the start as though trying to throw him off his course. There were strange dreams, and visions, and he walks in a sort of fever. Nothing seems quite real after the Crossroads, nothing except the sword in his hand and his goal: the Green Chapel. He has an appointment to keep.

He grows only more determined to reach his destination.

The nights grow colder. He wakes up shivering, rolling over, trying to wake the embers of the fire, and every time his eyes open they are looking for the foolish girl in her armor. They find only blackness and he remembers then the crossroads and the hole he dug besides the road.

He missed her terribly.

He misses her still, sitting here before the Green Knight. It is a persistent ache, a weight that grows heavier by the day. It makes him feel ancient to contemplate. He sounds like one of the rusty old knights who cluster around Robert, lamenting the roads not taken, the women they might have settled down with. Lost loves. It has been only days and yet it seems like years ago, and a road already overgrown and impassable. He can see it already, the enormity of his mistake. His life might have become something entirely different, improbably better. The opportunity came to him, and he wasted it.

Brienne. The Maiden Knight. She could have been his lady love and his brother-at-arms all at once. Would anything have been so perfectly suited to him as that? He will never find her like again, and even if he did he would not want it; he will only want her, for the rest of his life.

Jaime muses over these memories through the hours. The journey, the past, the world around him. Time seems to settle into a hazy blur.

The sun rises slowly, impossibly slowly. He cannot see it past the trees, but the world gradually brightens, with gentle insistence. The greens grow ever more lush and verdant all around him. The wall where the Green Knight stands turns from grim grey to a lively grass color, the dark ivy wound around in loops that seem to form an altar of deep mossy overgrowth around the still and sleeping form of the Knight.

His hands worry at the hilt of the greatsword that he had come to return. He might leave the blade on the altar and go. Would that fulfill his word?

What did Jaime do with his famous sword, during the year he had it? Only held it aloft for others to see. Used it to threaten, and to cajole. Boasted of it to other lords. But the only time he had just cause to draw it he had chosen to retreat instead, and in doing lost the only thing of any value he had ever found.

If only he had gone with her. Agreed right at the first, without hesitation. If he had stood at her side it might have ended differently. One had no chance, but two, perhaps, might have survived. He might have taken her with him to the Green Chapel. He might have taken her home to the King. He might have seen her made a knight, and stood proudly beside her at the king’s table. The tales he might have made with her, he would be proud to tell.

The Knight’s form comes into clearer and clearer relief: looming over him, impossibly tall, improbably wide.

Jaime knows with cold certainty that the Knight is going to wake very soon. As the light grows stronger, the Green Chapel is waking around him with a thousand tiny movements. He can almost make out the subtle sound of leaves uncurling to the sun, and worms crawling in the earth.

The sword, Oathkeeper, quivers in his hands, as though outraged. How did he dare to carry that blade to this place intending to lie? To break his promise? More and more he thinks he did not. He came here for something else entirely.

Jaime finds, for the first time that he can remember, his hands are trembling. It is one thing to go to battle, but another entirely to go to an execution. His heart beats in his ears with a deep drumbeat of doom... doom... doom...

He’s not here to fight a duel, is he? What, then, is he here for?

Glory? Judgement? Mercy? Absolution?

Or only the cold, mechanical means of his inevitable end?

Was all this journey only for that? Is he truly here only to get a blade through his chest? And if so, might it be worth his while? After all, is there any better way for a knight to die? Will it not be a fitting end to his legend?

But he isn’t ready to die. Not willingly. Not without redeeming his honor, making something of himself. If he had another year… but would he do any more with that than he had the last? Than he has with all of the years thus far? Is there any amount of time that would make any more of himself than he has already?

The time he needed was these weeks on the road with Brienne. That showed him what kind of man he’d like to be. But he failed her when it mattered most. Perhaps he should be judged for that. Not a year from now, nor twenty. Today.

The sun rises higher in the sky, and paints the Green Chapel gold. The air warms, and birdsong calls to him on the breeze. The day is relentlessly pleasant, with a promise of endless more such days to follow. A bittersweet longing fills him. It has never seemed half so lovely to be alive as it does in this beautiful place. If only he could have brought her here.

I will be brave, he says to himself. Like Brienne.

All at once there is a great creaking sound of wood bending and tearing, and when Jaime looks up the green altar is moving. Green leaves tremble and wave purposefully, and twigs and small branches snap and fall away to rest in the dirt below. The trunk of the altar pulls itself free, excavates itself from the enclosure in the leaves and branches. Limbs pull free, and something nearly human rises out of the green, the bark of its skin glistening, newborn.

The Green Knight is standing.

Jaime looks up, and up, and up, from where he sits on the mossy floor of the green chapel, and his hand grips the hilt of his sword.

He is ready to fight, by instinct, and to flee, by sudden impulse. He is afraid, he realizes, afraid in a way he has never been before. There is more than a blow to the heart to fear here. There is the fate of his soul, which is suddenly entirely in question. Before his journey he had no doubt of his own worth as a knight, and now he is just as certain in the opposite direction. Is he worthy? He is not. He is not.

Slowly, he stands. The sun shines down on him through the same corridor in the trees where he had watched the stars the night previous, and its warmth is a rebuke; why should the sun shine upon one such as him? He is the golden knight no more. He is only a man, a man with a sword that does not belong to him.

His eyes raise last of all.

Jaime finds through the golden light the Green Knight’s face. The eyes first, through a thin bloom of leaves and moss, and then the nose, the jawline. He has never seen it so clearly before, not even when he had stabbed her through the heart. With slow realization his eyes travel down and up again, taking in the shape of his host, and her nature.

The Green Knight is a woman? Why didn’t he realize it before?

It seems only too clear now. The slight narrowing of the waist and wrists, and in the face… not a pretty face, but undeniably feminine. Full lips, round cheeks, and the eyes...

Blue eyes. Beautiful blue, sad blue, noble and sorry. The lost blue of long-forgotten clear skies.

When he sees them his hands stop shaking. All is well. His grand sword slips from his fingers and settles softly in the grass, sinks gently into the ground, is welcomed.

“It’s you,” he says. “I’m glad it’s you.”

The girl from the Crossroads is standing before him.

He doesn’t understand how it is possible. Was she always the Knight? Was all an illusion? Was the Knight in disguise when he met her, or was the Knight once that girl? But it doesn’t matter. Whoever she is, she is here now, and it is good and right that this happen to him.

Her voice is low and rusty, like a hinge that has not moved in many years, and slow in its opening.

“You... kept... our appointment,” the Knight creaks.

His mouth is gone dry. “One year hence. You gave me time enough. And so I am here.”

He thinks he sees her smile, faintly. With the crackling sound of breaking branches, the Knight gestures to his feet.

“You... dropped your sword... my Lord.” Ser Jaime glances down at Oathkeeper, already disappearing beneath the twining vines on the forest floor. “Is it not time... for our blades to cross? A duel to make your legend?”

“I made you a promise,” he says faintly, and puts a hand over his unguarded heart. “It seems my word is all I have, and if it means nothing to anyone else, it means something to me.”

She smiles. An oaken hand reaches out and touches him on the face, gently. “My brave knight.”

Her eyes are the bluest skies he has ever seen. He is not afraid. Not anymore.

“Are you ready?” she asks him, still stroking his cheek.

“Yes.” He is eager for it now. “Strike your blow.”

“Straight through the heart,” she agrees. Then she reaches out with her other hand to touch the other side of his face.

She kisses him.

#dreadwulf fic #jaime lannister #braime

57 notes · View notes

comfyswitcherblanketfort · 3 years

Text

Promise

listen. i gotta write at least one fic per quarter centered around my psych class. this quarter is abnormal psych so yall get some psychiatrist Jaskier and neurology professor Geralt arguing over Conversion Disorder. I- i have no excuse. I am just this way. I don’t know what to tell you. Actually no, blame @geraltrogerericduhautebellegarde and @dani-dandelino for enabling me

Fun psych fact! Conversion Disorder is a malfunctioning sense or loss of voluntary motor abilities without a medical/neurological cause. Used to require a preceding stressor but the DSM-5 got rid of that and I’m no expert but im defs giving them some side eye for it. Think John Watson’s leg in the BBC Sherlock series, but it can be blindness or loss of hearing or any kind of voluntary motor skill.

Warnings: i mean, they swear? it’s them debating the causes/diagnostic requirements/ possible faking a disorder. it’s not something that would be a common trigger that i can think of but it’s worth mentioning?

_________________

“No, you’re not listening to me. The patient wasn't consciously feigning it. I’m not saying they were just in there to fuck with me,” Geralt huffed, setting his cappuccino down and glaring at Jaskier across the tiny café table.

Jaskier’s eyes nearly bulged out of his head as he took a deep breath for his rebuttal. The psychiatrist was adamant that he was right and damnit he would argue his point until he turned blue in the face, “But that would go against your theory of a physical root to the disorder! If there’s something neurologically wrong then malingering isn’t possible, Geralt! If you distract the patient from the problem and suddenly it’s gone then it must be psychological!”

“Bullshit.”

“I swear to Melitelle- you had better back that up with a reason,” Jaskier pinched the bridge of his nose, doing his best not to get angry at the neurologist’s blunt style of… well of everything.

“It’s your diathesis-stress model! Your discipline came up with it!” Geralt dug around in his bag for his tablet, ranting as he set it up and punched in his pin, “You said it yourself that it's stressors, not capital T Trauma that bring this on! So why don’t other people have the same problem every time they get bad news or a shit grade on their test? A physical predisposition!”

Jaskier’s eyebrows shot into his hairline, “Oh, so you’ve magically produced evidence of a genetic or physical predisposition when it’s been looked for for decades and not a single abnormality can be found? Please.”

Geralt leaned in and squinted to see his screen better, “No, a change brought on by the stressor that resolves when CD is ‘cured’. I like ‘resolved’ better but Yen insisted on ‘cured’.”

Jaskier snorted into his double sweet mocha with caramel and whip, “That’s not the diathesis-stress model. That’s wishful thinking.”

“If intense emotional stress can cause symptoms of a heart attack why can’t it change the brain structure?”

His tone was absolutely pissing Jaskier off. It didn’t matter if what he said had any kind of logical backing now. It was all out war.

“Don’t talk to me like one of your students, Geralt! I will-”

“Look at the thalamus on these scans and tell me what you see,” Geralt was smug. Fuck, Jaskier hated when he was smug. It was harder to stay angry at him when he looked so damn good.

He shot him a warning glare before inspecting the scans and sighing, “They’re normal.”

“Yes. Now these.” Geralt toggled to a different window of more scans.

“They’re also normal.”

Geralt looked at him in shock, then the scans, then back at Jaskier, “No they’re fucking not!”

The poor barista sent to their table tapped her knuckles on the edge, “I hate to interrupt but we’re closing soon. Can I get you two anything else?”

Jaskier flashed her an apologetic smile, “No, dear, we’re fine. We’ll get out of your hair soon. Promise.”

She smiled and nodded, then crossed her arms, “I have to ask. Were you two like, forced to work together? Some of the other girls have bets going.”

Geralt was still engrossed in examining his scans but he didn’t miss a beat, answering in unison with Jaskier, “We’re married.”

The girl laughed and turned back to her coworkers, “Karla you owe me your tips! Suck it!”

Jaskier shook his head and turned back to Geralt, “Darling, unclench. Maybe your grad student just mislabeled the file.”

Geralt shot him a glare over the edge of the screen, “Yen saw the abnormality too,” he grumbled.

“Yen wants tenure,” Jaskier reminded him, laying a tip on their table and standing to shrug on his coat.

“She’s not… You’re right. She would magnify a possible finding to boost her chances,” Geralt pouted as he packed his tablet and followed Jaskier out the door.

“Maybe send them to Ves?” Jaskier suggested, lacing their fingers together and swinging their arms a bit more dramatically than necessary.

Geralt shot him a grin, “I’ll put them on the big screen at home. I know I saw it.”

Jaskier rolled his eyes, “As long as you actually come to bed tonight.”

Geralt used their intertwined hands to pull Jaskier closer, planting a kiss in his hair, “I promise.”

226 notes · View notes

shera-dnd · 3 years

Link

I told you I was gonna write a fic based on it and here it is! Inspired by this fantastic piece from @kurokaneart

A pretty short story in which Weiss did not fall at the end of Volume 8, and after years of wandering Vacuo alone, she finally gets a shot at avenging her team

That design deserved a fight scene to match it and I hope I delivered on it

It had been two years.

Two years since Atlas fell from the sky.

Two years since the relics had been lost.

Two years since so many people were lost to the void.

Weiss had been alone for two gods damned years.

It was still fresh on her mind, the day her friends fell to their doom. How one by one they were swallowed by the abyss, and she had been powerless to save them. How she herself almost met the same fate, had she not been saved by her sister at the last possible moment. A sister who now carried the mantle of the Winter Maiden, passed down from yet another dead friend.

So it was no surprise to anyone that Weiss had been in a state of shock for the following few days. In fact she wasn’t even sure how long that lasted as she hadn’t been fully aware of the passage of time as her heart struggled with all it had lost.

What surprised them was when she left.

The reasonable thing to do after all that happened would have been to stick with her surviving friends, work together and do everything they could to make sure they wouldn’t lose anyone else. But Weiss wasn’t in a reasonable mood. She was grieving the loss of her family - her real family - and she couldn’t bear the notion of just replacing them, of being a part of anything besides Team RWBY.

So she wandered the deserts that surrounded Vacuo, fighting bandits, slaying grimm, all while doing all she could to keep the memory of her team alive. All while carving herself into a walking memorial to those she lost.

In time she was forced to adapt to the desert. Crying was a waste of precious water, as was cleaning her unreasonably long hair, so in time her tears dried up and her hair was cut short. Soon heels gave way to sensible combat boots, and her dress was replaced by proper armor. Months of constant physical exercise and her new fighting style had also led to changes even to her body shape, leaving her more muscular than she ever thought she could be.

Part of her couldn’t help but worry that this meant that Weiss had died with her teammates, that whoever walked Vacuo now was some other woman wearing her face. So still she latched onto scraps of her older self. The lovely blue of her favorite dress now lived on in her cape, bound to her by a metal clasp bearing her family’s symbol. Her earrings too remained, even if they brought her the wrong kind of attention from time to time.

And so the months passed and Weiss continued her travels, hunting down Salem’s followers wherever she found them. Even getting to take her anger out on a certain scorpion bastard, though she knew he was just one more piece in some impossibly large scheme to end the world.

Now two years had passed since the Fall of Atlas and once more Weiss found herself at the entrance to a relic vault as yet another huntsmen academy came under attack. This time though, she stood alone, waiting for the one person she had spent two years looking forward to seeing again.

��Well well well, here I thought I’d never have to see your face again,” Cinder’s disgustingly smug tone echoed through the underground chamber as her silhouette appeared by its entrance, “what was it that those friends of yours called you again, Ice Queen?”

Cinder had changed a lot in these past couple of years. Once again she donned a new outfit for her new environment, this one echoing some of her choices from her old student disguise back at Beacon. Though the change that actually caught Weiss’s eye was her grimm arm. She no longer bothered hiding it as the cancerous growth had now spread to cover not only her entire arm but parts of her chest and neck. Weiss wouldn’t be surprised if she found that her heart too had become grimm.

Her attitude, unfortunately, stayed the same.

“Love the new look, by the way,” she mocked, “I could almost believe you’re not just a Schnee brat.”

Weiss’s fists clenched, but she did not bother with a response. She knew how Cinder worked, she played dirty and messed with people’s heads, so the less fuel Weiss gave her the better. Instead she just cracked her neck, stretched her sword arm and called on her semblance.

A summoning glyph appeared behind her, but this time none of her defeated foes stepped out to defend her, instead frost covered her arms, slowly shaping itself into spectral white armor. She extended a hand forward and in it began to form a massive sword, pointing towards her enemy in challenge.

She was about to take down a maiden.

“Cute trick,” Cinder commented, her steps echoing as she casually walked down the chamber, “I wonder where you got it from.”

To make her point she extended her hands and a pair of swords formed in them with a flash of heat. The implication that Weiss had anything to thank Cinder for, was unfortunately enough to prompt her to speak.

“Are you always so full of--”

With a burst of flames Cinder had launched for Weiss’s throat, the glass blade nearly connecting with the huntress’s neck in that moment of distraction, before Weiss could stumble backwards and out of the way. Cinder continued to push though, strike after strike backing Weiss against the vault’s doors, never allowing her to recover her balance.

Weiss grunted as a kick to the stomach sent her reeling back against those doors. Cinder dashed for her again, but this time she was prepared. Pushing off the door with one arm she slammed an armored hand on Cinder’s chest - a small propulsion glyph appearing in her palm - and launched the maiden backwards with incredible force.

Another glyph then took shape under Weiss, sending her flying up in an arc, plunging at Cinder, ready to cut her down. The maiden simply rolled aside and jumped up before the attack could connect. Once more their blades clashed, but this time it was Weiss’s turn to take the offensive.

Back in her Beacon days, Weiss would dance across the battlefield with the precision and grace of a ballerina. Though much of said grace had been lost over the years, she still saw her fighting style as a dance of sorts, no longer a balle, but a waltz between her and her greatsword, and now Cinder found herself caught in the path of these deadly dance partners.

Weiss pushed her back with each step, advancing with every slice and spin of her sword until they found themselves once more at the center of the room. She dipped her dance partner, striking its pommel to Cinder’s human wrist and making her sword drop. She spun on her heels aiming to slice off that grimm arm, but once again their blades clashed. Cinder’s human hand flew for the grip of her remaining sword, pushing Weiss’s summoned blade with all her might.

Usually that wouldn’t work. Between her stronger physique and the Arma Gigas’s armor she could easily power through most attempts at simply blocking her attacks like this, but of course it wouldn’t be that easy. The grimm maiden was inhumanly strong after all and kept Weiss’s sword at bay with ease.

“I must say, I’m impressed,” Cinder commented, a chuckle escaping her throat as she watched Weiss struggle to match her strength, “but don’t fool yourself. We both know you’re nothing on your own.”

With that, Weiss snapped.

A propulsion glyph formed behind her, shoving her forward and adding its force to the clash. It wasn’t enough to push Cinder back, but it was enough to do something even better.

A loud crack echoed throughout the chamber as Cinder’s glass swords shattered under the intense pressure. She forged new ones from thin air, but Weiss was quick to crush those too. There were no more attempts at grace, no more dancing, no more technique or skill, just deadly force as the room was filled with the sounds of crushing glass and Weiss’s shouts, her sword slamming down again and again like a blunt instrument.

This, of course, was exactly what Cinder wanted. Her grimm arm caught Weiss’s sword with ease and a jet of flame from her mouth made the huntress stumble and fall. Casually she crushed the sword in her hand and sauntered her way to her disarmed opponent.

Weiss rose to her knees and another summoning glyph appeared before her, producing a much needed replacement sword. But before she could reach for it a fireball incinerated the glyph and the sword with it.

“This was cute,” Cinder mocked, not even bothering with any swords anymore, simply raising her hand and preparing to fireball Weiss out of existence, “but I think it’s time we put an end to it.”

It was that look. That tone in her voice like she had already won, like her defeat was never even a possibility. It was that smug attitude that gave Weiss every motivation she needed to keep fighting to the bitter end, just to show her that the last remnant of team RWBY wasn’t about to lie down and accept death.

Thankfully, team RWBY still had her back.

She launched forward and slammed an armored fist against that stupid smirk of hers. The look of absolute shock on that bitch’s face was more than enough of a reward on its own, but Weiss still had more for her.

Taking a boxing stance Weiss planted punch after punch on Cinder’s body, every jab and every dodge aided by her propulsion glyphs. Her fast movement kept Cinder on her toes as she was slammed over and over again.

With a cry of rage Cinder unleashed her maiden powers, sending Weiss flying backwards with a powerful gust of wind, but the huntress was not so easily intimidated. Another glyph caught her and launched back at her foe. Cinder smirked and raised her grimm arm. She was more than happy to capitalize on Weiss’s foolhardiness by shooting her out of the air with another ball of flames.

Unfortunately for the mad maiden, Weiss was no fool.

Another glyph appeared under her and sent her flying upwards, completely avoiding Cinder’s attack and sending spinning over her foe with the grace of a gymnast. Weiss had barely landed behind her before bashing Cinder once more, putting all her force into a single punch that sent her flying.

She knew she couldn’t waste time, she couldn’t let the maiden recover. So she called upon a massive summoning glyph and while that one prepared to unleash its fury, a smaller one appeared on Weiss’s palm. From the small glyph shot the hooked stinger of a Queen Lancer, it pierced Cinder’s grimm arm causing her to scream in pain. Then with all her strength Weiss pulled her down to the ground.

No, not the ground. She pulled her down into the waiting maw of a Giant Nevermore. The summon swallowed her whole and flew up, readying itself to dive down, slamming them both to the ground with deadly force.

Still it was not enough.

The Nevermore burst into flames as fire spewed from Cinder’s hands, feet, and mouth. The look of smug superiority on the maiden’s face now replaced with one of pure primal fury, blade after blade after blade were forged around her with a flash of her terrifying power. That...wasn’t good.

Weiss felt her hands shake and her eyes closed.

All of that, and all she managed to do was make her angry.

Two years training and preparing for this confrontation, and she still couldn’t do anything.

She couldn’t stop Cinder. She couldn’t avenge her friends, and now the last member of her team would die to her hand like all the rest.

No.

No! No!

Her team was gone, but they were still protecting her, still doing everything they could to let her keep fighting. She wasn’t gonna let her efforts and their sacrifice be in vain. She would keep fighting, and she would take Cinder down once and for all.

When she opened her eyes a glyph had taken form under her, but this one was different from the rest, for instead of her family’s snowflake, this one had the shape of a ticking clock. A haste glyph. And as it began to take effect on her body, two more summoning glyphs appeared before her. And from them Weiss drew a pair of shorter swords.

Cinder’s barrage of explosive weaponry came raining down on the huntress, but now she was prepared. With her speed vastly increased she struck forward with her twin blades, slicing down weapon after weapon with her aura, trying to find an opening through the chaos. Taking the first chance she got she crossed her blades and brought them down with all her might, shaping her aura into an X and sending it flying through Cinder’s attack.

First came a disgusting wet sound as the grimm arm was sliced cleanly off, then came the screams. Cinder cried and contorted in agony in mid air, more and more smoke rose from her wound with each passing moment, while her arm began to regrow.

That was it. That was the moment. Weiss just had to close the gap and--!

Pain wracked every muscle of her body, bringing her down to her knees. Her haste glyph had worn off, now her body burned from the overexertion, and a wave of lethargy drained all the strength from her body.

That moment of weakness was all Cinder needed to recover. She growled and with another grand display of might, she reached with her power for every last broken fragment of glass that littered the floor and set them ablaze.

Weiss had no means to escape that one.

It was as if the entire chamber had been carpet bombed, the myriad explosions tossing Weiss around like a ragdoll until she was unceremoniously dropped to the ground, dizzy, sore, exhausted. Still she pushed herself off up with all she had left.

Her summoned armor had been completely destroyed, her cape was in ruins, she was covered in soot, and her aura was barely holding it together. Proper tactics would require her to retreat, stay on the defensive, and wait to recover before taking the offense again. Weiss knew she had no such luxury.

Her only chance of survival was to finish Cinder before she had the chance to finish her. So she drew on every last scrap of energy she had left in her body and threw it all into one single desperate plan to end that monster for good.

She forced herself to stand and threw her hand forward, a black gravity glyph forming under the maiden. It pulled her down to the ground with force, but that was far from enough to keep her down. Storm winds filled the chamber, almost knocking Weiss off her feet again, weakening her glyph just enough to let Cinder stand up again.

Weiss threw her other hand and a pair of summoned Centinels emerged from the ground, wrapping themselves around their target, and dragging her back down. Cinder snarled and growled like an animal, slicing at them with her grimm claw and breathing out jets of flame.

Weiss knew they wouldn’t be able to lock her in place for long, so she quickly put the next part of her plan into motion. Another propulsion glyph formed under her and a summon glyph above. The first sent her flying through the second and she emerged on the other side, not with armor, but with a pair of spectral white wings.

Flying up as high as she could, her wings spread at the apex of her flight, holding her in place for one last moment so she could line up one final dive against her prey. One last time the Arma Gigas’s sword took shape in her hand and her wings closed around her.

She spun around her axis as her body plummeted with terrifying speed, the ground approaching her almost too fast for her to react, but right as she was about to collide, her wings spread out and for one glorious moment she was a whirlwind of death, slicing through Cinder with a spinning slash.

And for the first time in years, Cinder’s aura cracked. Blood poured out from a single long gash across her back and she collapsed to the ground. Weiss followed soon after.

She did it.

No, they did it.

Her friends had been avenged. Cinder had fallen. Weiss could finally rest.

That was all she needed right now, to just lie down, close her eyes, and get her well earned rest. The floor beneath her was hard and cold, but she didn’t mind it at all. She was so tired and this was just what she needed.

…

“Weiss!”

“Please wake up!”

“Weiss, please stay with us!”

Huh, she must have fallen asleep there on the floor. She was having that dream again. That dream where all her friends were still alive.

“Jaune, you have to help her!”

What other explanation would she have for this? For these familiar voices, for those warm touches, for the sight of silver eyes hovering just above her.

“Come on! Come on! Come on! Heal damn it!”

It was a nice dream. The kind of dream she didn’t want to wake up from.

So she closed her eyes again and drifted back to sleep...

#RWBY #weiss schnee #cinder fall #weiss schnee vs cinder fall #fight scene #weiss did not fall #ruby rose #blake belladonna #yang xiao long #jaune arc #feels #major character death

11 notes · View notes

mfingenius · 4 years

Note

I kind of love how you casually mention Harry’s parents in some fics 😭 So here’s a prompt: Harry and Draco start dating in Hogwarts and it gets serious and they catch feelings super quickly and Harry brings Draco home one weekend, sneaking out of the castle so that Draco can meet his parents proper 🥺❤️

Babe I took so long to reply to this I’m so so sorry

To make up for it,,,, here’s a roughly 2.4k fanfic :D

21.11.2019

“Potter,” Snape drawls, managing to sound unimpressed even in the middle of the night. “What are you doing here?”

Harry glares at the professor while rubbing Draco’s back soothingly. It’s the day before the start of the winter Holidays - they’re both in a boarding school called Hogwarts - and they’re going home tomorrow. Draco’s having an anxiety attack - he has them worryingly often - over meeting Harry’s parents over the break; it’s the third time, and Harry has told him multiple times that he doesn’t have to meet his parents yet, if he doesn’t want to, but Draco refuses to cancel now.

And Harry refuses not to be there for his boyfriend.

“I’m helping,” he says, much less aggressively than he wants to. He wishes he could punch Snape - he hates him - but Draco’s anxiety attacks don’t do well with harsh voices, and the last thing Harry wants to do is make things worse.

“These are the Slytherin dorms.” Snape says, as if one of his students isn’t retching right in front of him. “You’re not a Slytherin. You can’t be here.”

“Are you going to physically throw me out?” Harry asks in return. “Because if you’re not, you can get out now. I’m not coming with you.”

Draco retches again, and Harry grimaces and moves closer to his side, touching the back of Draco’s hand lightly. As soon as he does, Draco’s hand latches onto his with a death grip, ashen and sweaty, and Harry squeezes tightly.

“Twenty five points from Gryffindor, Potter.” Snape says disapprovingly.

Harry doesn’t give a fuck.

Draco rests his head against Harry’s shoulder, shuddering, and Harry presses his lips against his hair, wrapping an arm around Draco and holding him tightly.

“It’s alright,” he murmurs. “It’s alright. Everything’s okay, love.” Draco lets out a shaky breath and wraps a hand around Harry’s jumper weakly. Harry places his hand over Draco’s and kisses his hair again. “Think about the road trip, alright? At the beginning of the school year? We had fun, right? It was fun.”

“Yes,” Draco says, trembling. “Yeah.”

13.09.19

“Harry Potter and Draco Malfoy.” Sprout calls out.

“You’ve got to be fucking kidding me,” Harry groans.

“What did you expect, Potty?” Malfoy sneers next to him. The corners of his lips are pulled down, and he looks just as unhappy as Harry is about being paired together.

Honestly, Harry doesn’t know. They always end up as partners for anything Elective-related - it’s Botany this year, an elective Harry isn’t really interested in. He only chose it because Malfoy and him have ended up not only in the same elective every single year they’ve been at Hogwarts, but also paired together in them.

He’d thought Botany would surely be Malfoy’s last choice.

Apparently, Malfoy had thought the same thing.

Still, he was hoping that this time, by some miracle, he’d be paired with Ron, or Hermione, or even Ernie McMillan. Anyone but Malfoy.

They’re going on a school trip to the mountains, so being paired together not only means working together to identify plants and cultivate them when they come back, it means sharing a room while they’re in the cabins.

Harry honestly doubts he’ll survive an entire two weeks staying in the mountains with Malfoy. He doesn’t think he’ll survive the first night sharing a room with Malfoy. Getting stabbed in the stomach with a fork and bleeding out would be a quicker, less painful death.

Still, it looks like Harry will have to suffer through Malfoy instead of the fork.

Oh the joy.

“I’m not doing our work by myself.” Malfoy informs him snidely as everyone goes to find their partners. Ron gives him an empathetic pat on the back and makes a face at Malfoy before he walks off.

“Have you ever done our work all by yourself?” Harry asks, annoyed even though Malfoy has barely said a dozen words to him. It’s a special ability that only Malfoy seems to have, of pissing Harry off without even opening his mouth.

“I don’t know,” Malfoy says. “Calculus? Geography? Fucking Christ, Physics?”

“Bite me.” Harry tells him.

21.11.19

“I was an arse.” Draco says in a low voice, damp eyelashes fluttering gently against Harry’s shoulder. Snape left some time ago, Harry thinks, but he doesn’t know how long. He’s too focused on Draco to notice anything else. “We hated each other.”

“I don’t know if that’s what it was.” Harry shrugs lightly. He’d thought he hated Malfoy at the moment, obviously, but, now that they’re dating, Harry sees it differently. “We were always awfully invested in each other’s business. We could’ve just avoided each other.”

Draco snorts tiredly, rubbing a hand over his face. “Awfully invested sounds about right. Pansy had the theory that all of our problems would just be solved if we fucked. She postulated it in fifth year.”

Harry snickers. “And was she right?”

“Well,” Draco says with a light smirk. “We fucked. And now here we are.”

Harry laughs.

17.09.19

“Potter I fucking swear to god,” Malfoy groans, glaring at Harry tightly.

It’s only the second day, and Harry’s already been driven half insane by Malfoy. The room they’re sharing is tiny, and it has quickly become evident that they’re very different people; Malfoy hasn’t left a single belonging in the room, and half of Harry’s clothes are already thrown about.

It seems to annoy Malfoy, so Harry hasn’t picked them up.

“What?” Harry asks, rolling his eyes as he picks plant samples. “I’m doing my part of the work, aren’t I?”

“You’re supposed to wear gloves you moronic git.” Malfoy snaps, tossing a pair of gardening gloves to Harry. “Some of the plants are poisonous.”

“As if you care if I get poisoned.” He says.

Malfoy doesn’t answer.

21.11.19

“You should thank me,” Draco says, teasingly, before he begins brushing his teeth. The vomiting is over, finally, as is the anxiety attacked. Harry can’t imagine what Draco feels like; his anxiety attacks leave Harry feeling drained and not quiet like himself, and he’s not even the one to go through them. He imagines it’s much worse for Draco. “I saved your arse by carrying extra gardening gloves.”

“Don’t act like that was for my sake,” Harry responds, amused. Because he can read Draco quite well now and knows every sign of exhaustion and worry that there is to look for, he has his hands on Draco’s hips, half out of the need for comfort and half because he’s not entirely sure Draco doesn’t need his actual support. “You didn’t carry extra for me.”

When his anxiety attacks are particularly bad, he can’t quite move afterwards, and this one was Bad, capital B. He’s almost sure he’s the only thing holding Draco on his feet.

“Saved your arse anyway,” Draco says around his toothbrush.

“Yeah?” Harry asks, squeezing his boyfriend’s hips lightly. “Well, I saved your arse the next day.”

Draco scowls at him through the mirror.

17.09.19

“Get out of my way.” Malfoy snaps.

“You’re sick,” Harry says, unimpressed. This camping trip has been surprisingly fun for Harry. Mostly because it hasn’t been fun for Malfoy. Turns out his skin burns easily, and he’s had red cheeks and a red nose for the last three days. He’s also been sick for two of them, but Harry had thought it was none of his business.

It still isn’t, really, but it’s harder to ignore when it’s pouring rain and Malfoy still wants to go outside instead of staying in the bloody cabin like Harry is telling him to.

“So?” Malfoy snaps. “Thirty percent of our grade depends on how this goes.”

“I’ll pick the samples today.” Harry rolls his eyes “And I’ll take notes, and pictures, and do the work. I’m not an idiot, you know?” Malfoy shifts uncertainly, looking back towards the empty cabin, eyes focusing on the flickering candle. The cabins are old, and, because of the rain, the light isn’t working. All they have is the candle, and neither of them know how much longer that’ll last. Harry raises an eyebrow. “What? Scared to stay here alone?”

“No!” Malfoy snaps, much too quickly.

“Then stay,” Harry says, and slams the door closed behind him, pulling on his raincoat.

21.11.19

“You don’t have to do this,” Draco says, but his hand tightens around Harry’s when he turns the bathroom light off. They’re both seventeen, and, in Draco’s opinion, too old to be afraid of silly things, like the dark.

He’s fine, most of the time. Whenever he’s stressed or particularly anxious, though, he gets terrified of the dark, though. Harry doesn’t mind grabbing his hand and reassuring him things are alright. He needs reassurance in other things that other people might think are silly, and he never wants to make Draco afraid that he’ll laugh at him.

“I know.” Harry pulls him towards the bed - honestly, he doesn’t know what he’d do if Snape had actually kicked him out - and gets in first, waiting for Draco to snuggle against him comfortably before pulling the covers over them. Draco’s roommate and best friend, Blaise Zabini, is in the other bed, still soundly asleep. Harry pulls the drapes around the bed closed.

“Better?” He asks, and Draco nods against his chest, moving closer. Harry wraps an arm around him while Draco throws a leg over his waist.

“Do you remember our first kiss?” Draco whispers, and Harry smiles softly.

“Obviously,” he says. He can’t believe it was only two months ago; it seems like much longer. He looks at the clock Draco keeps against his headboard and smiles. “It’s already after midnight. Our first kiss was officially two months ago. Happy anniversary.”

Draco shakes his head and grins. “Sap.”

“Only for you, love.” Harry vows.

21.09.19

“Malfoy,” Harry says hesitantly.

He’d had a great time during the day. Since Malfoy was sick, he’d been able to be with Ron and Hermione the entire day, but he’d come back from picking samples to find Malfoy in a full blown anxiety attack. It had been hell calming him down. It had taken almost half the night, and now they’re both lying in their respective beds, Malfoy shivering and with a slightly distant look on his face, and Harry feeling immensely uncomfortable.

“Hmm?” Malfoy hums lightly.

“I didn’t know you had anxiety attacks.” He says.

He doesn’t think he’d want to talk about it, if it were him, but Malfoy hasn’t told him to shut up yet, and Harry’s a nervous talker.

“Oh,” Malfoy says lightly.

“Don’t you… take meds?” He asks cautiously.

Malfoy blinks at him - Harry can see his wide eyes in the pale moonlight, looking almost transparent with how light they are - and his voice sounds oddly unguarded when he answers.

“No,” He says.

“Why?” Harry asks.

“My mom doesn’t know,” He says. “I can’t tell her.”

Harry knows very little of Narcissa Black - because she’s Sirius’s cousin, he knows that she got pregnant with Malfoy when she was seventeen - four years younger than Lily, Harry’s mother, and pregnant at the same time - and that she was disowned for it. Sirius told him that she’d married Malfoy’s father - Lucius Malfoy - briefly, but she’d divorced him when she was nineteen, when Draco was barely a year and a half.

“Why not?” he asks.

“I can’t worry her.” Malfoy says.

Lightning cracks outside, and Malfoy flinches, sitting up in bed quickly. Harry sits up too.

“I - I need to get out of here,” He says, voice trembling. Harry throws back the covers and stands quickly as Malfoy begins to scramble off the bed desperately. “I - I can’t-”

“Stop,” Harry says, softly but firmly, grabbing Malfoy’s arms. “Stop.It’s alright. It’s okay. Let’s sit down, okay?”

He leads Malfoy to the bed again, sitting him down and sitting beside him. He doesn’t know much about panic attacks, if he’s honest, but Lavender Brown had one, once, in the middle of the common Room. He remembers how Parvati Patil calmed her down.

“Tell me something,” Harry says. “Five things you can hear. Five things, come on Draco.”

Malfoy doesn’t seem to notice that Harry called him by his first name, and he flinches again when lightning cracks again. Harry squeezes his arm.

“Five, come on. I’ll start.” He says. “Lightning.”

“Lightning,” Draco repeats shakily. “R - rain. I - I can - the wind outside. I-”

“That’s three,” Harry tells him. “You’re doing good. Two more, come on. Two more.”

“I - wood creaking. Your voice.”

“Good,” Harry says immediately. “That’s good.”

They get through four things you can see - Harry’s shoes by the door, the trees outside, the blanket on the bed, the suitcases under the bed - three things you can smell - rain, dirt, and mint, which is Harry’s shampoo - and two you can taste - blood, because he’d bit his lip too hard, and toothpaste.

“One you can feel.” Harry tells him. “Just one.”

The wind howls outside, and there’s a loud sound outside the window, which makes Malfoy nearly jump off the bed.

“I - I can’t - Harry-”

And Harry can see that everything they’ve done isn’t working, so he does the only thing he can think of.

He kisses Draco.

22.11.19

“Mr. and Mrs. Potter, it’s nice to meet you.” Draco says. He’s smiling uncertainly, and for all that Harry enjoys his dad’s and his godfather’s pranks, he prays they won’t say anything weird now. Draco’s anxious enough without them doing something, and though Harry made them promise to behave, he’s still anxious himself.

“Call me Lily, sweetheart,” Harry’s mom says immediately, smiling and shaking his hand. Draco shakes James’s hand, after. Harry can hear Sirius singing from the kitchen, deafeningly loud, Remus laughing and telling him to shut up at the same time.

“I, err-” Draco begins, and Lily immediately wraps an arm around his shoulders.

“Are you hungry? You’re terribly thin, sweetheart, are you sure you’re eating enough?” And she leads him inside, Draco sending a slightly panicked look back at Harry a moment before turning the corner towards the kitchen.

“So,” James says, after a bit, grinning brightly. “Draco Malfoy, then? No chance of someone else?”

Harry snorts and shakes his head. “No dad, no one else.”

James sighs, seemingly long-suffering, but then he laughs and claps Harry in the back. “Oh well,” he says. “If it can’t be helped, it can’t be helped. Come on. Let’s go save him from your mother.”

Harry laughs.

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

Send me a Request :D

If you enjoyed this, please consider buying me a kofi

Masterlist: [1] [2]

Commissions

#drarry #fanfic #mine

872 notes · View notes

eutheamavis · 3 years

Photo

⟨ OLIVIA HOLT. CIS FEMALE. SHE / HER. ⟩ though the mist might prevent some from seeing it, DOROTHEA “THEA” MAVIS is actually a descendant of A P O L L O. it’s still a question of whether or not the TWENTY - ONE year old AUDIO PRODUCTION MAJOR from JERSEY CITY, NEW JERSEY has taken after their godly parent completely, but the demigod is still known to be quite EMPATHETIC & RECKLESS.

☆ — MUSINGS — ☆ — PINTEREST — ☆ — PLAYLIST — ☆

the stats: full name: dorothea ‘thea’ mavis age: twenty one date of birth: march 26th, 1999 zodiac: aries sun, leo moon, cancer rising gender: cisgender female (she/her) sexuality: pansexual birth place: little ivywood, south carolina hometown: jersey city, new jersey, usa family: marlene mavis ( mother; fc: reese witherspoon ) apollo ( father; fc: aaron tveit ), farhad esfahani ( step – father ), rostan esfahani ( step – brother )

the story:

marlene mavis was the proud owner of the honeywell inn in little ivywood south carolina when she met a charming, handsome and well-spoken young poet, who found her quaint inn wholly inspiring and the very place for him to pen his next set of poems. the two spent a magical summer together and while apollo was long gone before dorothea arrived, but her mother always saw her daughter as a happy reminder of that summer. dorothea, called thea, grew up knowing her true parentage, after all apollo was never one to shy away from the spotlight. as soon as the girl picked up her first guitar, there was no doubt as to who her father was.

thea had always been remarkably close with her mother, the two looking almost like sisters as thea got older. marlene has always been the very definition of a free spirit, going where the wind would take her. thea loved her life on the road, always wondering where her beautiful mother would take her next: arizona to see the grand canyon? washington dc to see the nation’s capital? anywhere with an ocean? thea was always incredibly inspired by the places her mother took her. it was in nashville where she truly discovered her love of music. after given the opportunity to play a simple guitar at the age of six, thea took to the instrument like a duck to water. Plus all the long hours in the car provided ample time to play with chords and lyrics. thea’s first song: orange juice jam was written in a diner on the way from nasville to salt lake city. she saved all of her allowance to be able to purchase her first guitar that marlene picked up from a yard sale. they say it was love at first strum.

one day, while she and thea were vacationing in the glamorous town of jersey city, marlene met the man who would convince her to plant roots: farhad esfahani. at ten years old, thea loved watching her mother fall in love. farhad and his son, rostam, became thea’s family. she was beyond thrilled, seeing as marlene’s parents died when she was young and she was an only child. and while thea loved life on the road, she thrived in a more traditional and domestic homelife.

starting middle school in jersey city, thea easy found friends and things to do, charming most people with her music. she joined poetry and music club to help her songwriting skills and even joined choir to strengthen her voice. she was no star pupil due to her adhd and dyslexia, but everyone could tell that thea tried her best. the perfect antithesis to her new step – brother. high school was nothing different, except thea added cheer team to her list of extracurriculars as well as jazz band. her pretty face and lithe frame made thea a perfect fly girl to get tossed to the top of the pyramid. her natural pep and cheer was just an added bonus.

frustration brought out a whole different side of thea. whenever the girl felt cornered she would throw a fit, chucking books, screaming at the top of her lungs and getting so red in the face, it would resemble a bad sunburn. one time, she even punched a hole in the wall of her room. demigod strength was no joke…but once thea calmed down, she and marlene never had a problem with pretending it never happened…farhad and even rostam learned to just move on.

being a daughter of apollo, thea never really had to deal with monsters. once she turned 13, however, she was escorted to camp half blood by griffin the satyr, where thea joined cabin #7 every summer for volleyball, archery, s’mores and, of course, quests. she made her father proud at camp half blood and had tons of fun, but it was hardly a home to her. home was with her mother and a guitar.

thea is currently at school studying music and audio production. while she loves music, thea prefers to be behind the scenes writing songs for others to sing. she has a nice voice and likes singing to herself and the occasional companion, she’s not one to get up in front of a crowd to bear her soul.

the facts:

she’s dated two people, but has never been in love.

thea still collects souvenir pins whenever she travels

she has three guitars and they all have names: sunny the yamaha folk, presley the gibson les paul and lola the protégé uke

favorite color is yellow

greatest inspirations are carole king, the carpenters and taylor swift

the girl:

bubbly and effervescent, thea has been considered the ‘golden child’ pretty much all her life. she is up-beat, cheerful and is always trying to please the people around her. but don’t be fooled, the girl does not suffer fools. while she had yet to discover it, thea’s fatal flaw is her hot headed temper, which she prefers to pretend doesn’t exist. personably, thea has always been able to make friends wherever she goes. unfortunately, she’s never been great at expressing her emotions verbally. when she’s happy, she’ll do a toe touch and when she’s sad, she’ll lock herself in her room until she’s written a new song. speaking plainly has never been her forte. all in all, thea is a happy go lucky girl with a penchant for music and a big heart.

#☆ — about .

8 notes · View notes

capricornus-rex · 4 years

Text

Someone Left to Save (8)

Cal Kestis x Reader

Requested by Anon

Summary: The Mantis crew arrives to the capital of Ulfin, in the planet of Pevera, under siege. They meet the local rebel cell spearheaded by the former Republic admiral, Jax Beneb, who seeks to destroy the Empire’s occupation that was aggressively imposed upon while exploiting the planet of its natural resources. A plan is devised to destroy the Imperial’s main base of operations—as well as their influence—in the planet; however, it was a do-or-die mission that you and Cal had gotten yourselves caught in.

A/N: My computer just died on me twice now. Whatever bullshit it’s trying to do, it’s not helping my anxiety at all lmao I’m just outliving its usefulness until it actually dies for good... that is until I get a new SSD and HDD.

Tags: Force-Sensitive! Reader, Inquisitor! Reader, Jedi! Reader, Fake Death, Jedi turned Inquisitor, Seduction to the Dark Side, Turn to the Dark Side, The Dark Side of the Force, Aftermath of Torture, Torture, Psychological Torture, Redemption Arc! Reader, Possible Redemption, Premonitions

Also in AO3

Chapters: 1 – 2 – 3 – 4 – 5 – 6 | Previous: Part 7 | Next: Part 9 | Masterlist

8 of ?

“Hey, get up! It’s time for your daily exercise,” a Stormtrooper grumbled on the other side of the ray-shielded prison cell.

You sit there inside—eyes closed, in a meditation position on your knees, hands on top of them. Purposefully ignoring the guards, they tagged you as stubborn, dismissive, and ignorant. They can’t comprehend how you’re perfectly unmoved by the shouting and the banging of their weapons against the walls to draw your attention.

You can hear them, alright. You just chose not to listen.

A lie. Your mind spoke.

Ever since they saw your display against the Second Brother, the so-called “daily exercise” is a kind word they used for the gladiatorial training they throw you into. Everyday, they’d force you out of your cell—which, ironically, is the safest place you could ever be in this predicament—and each time you resisted, a strike on the head or the first body part they see is what you get in return. Once in the dojo, you face a wave of enemies; at first it was a batch of Scout Troopers—they were quite easy to fight—next they started mixing it up with Scout and Purge Troopers, and eventually they used Purge Troopers for your duels, the latter persisted for the rest of your days in the prison.

Sometimes no one knows who is whose training dummies—regardless, the fights went on and the Purge Troopers treated it like a breath of fresh air every time.

“HEY!” the Stormtrooper, impatient of your unresponsiveness, punched the wall at you. Your reaction defeated its purpose. “Do you hear me?! I said stand up!”

“Hey, don’t cause such a ruckus. It’s just one kid,”

“Are Jedi always this stubborn?”

The second Stormtrooper made an incoherent, indifferent grumble as he shrugged his shoulders, wanting to end the small talk and just wait until your budged. When there was nothing but silence, spare the muttering complaints of the guards in the midst of the silence, you relished the peace again.

“Well, finally,” you quietly tell yourself and hung your head down.

There were worse things to worry about.

Visions revolving in hate, anger, and even death—these were the images that you cannot purge from your mind. Not even the purification of meditating proved to be of any help. Something was clouding your mind in the Force and bent them to their malignant will.

Much later, the ray shield died down at the push of a button. The same, irate Stormtrooper enters your cell, but you remained still as a stone. His boot harshly bumps into your knee.

“Hey,” he nudged. “Stand up!”

Nothing.

Again, he kicked your knee, hard enough for it to bruise in a few minutes.

When he’s had about enough, he kicked you in the stomach—he made it precise for the tip of his boot to rupture your gut. As you were weak—which he took advantage of—you curled up, hugging yourself with your arms coiled around your torso, you writhed in pain while supporting your entire weight with one hand planted on the floor.

“Don’t make me hit you again—though I wouldn’t even need a reason!“ he snarled.

You sharply, nasally inhaled; fingernails scratching against the dirty metal floor of the cell as you wait out for the pain to alleviate. Your eyes flicked open and your head jerked up, shooting the Stormtrooper an unwelcoming, hateful look in the eye—he didn’t want to admit it, but he flinched when he saw your bloodshot eyes: dark circles framing it, and the linings swelling in a burning pink hue.

“Come on, Jedi, we got a long ahead of—”

A soft rumble in the air hummed around the cell. Apathetic eyes stared at the Stormtrooper, watching him gag, desperately gasp for air through the barely-breathable helmet, and claw at his neck. He submitted to his knees, in the same level as you sitting down leisurely in the middle of the room, and it’s as though you two saw eye-to-eye—through that black tinted visor, he catches an arrogant smirk curling at the corner of your mouth, and he realizes too late that he’s crossed you.

You were neither a Jedi nor an Inquisitor. For now, you were something in between. Your madness is basically limbo.

You slowly raise your hand, your fingers are curled in a chokehold but there was still a gap around them, though it didn’t stay that long because with an abrupt closing motion of the hand—a popping sound came from the Stormtrooper, his head had twisted to an abnormal angle, and then his corpse made a loud thud that alarmed his companion.

“Hey, what’s going on over th—?”

Horrified, the Stormtrooper choked on the last words of his sentence. He stood there frozen in the hallway, contemplating whether to step inside to pull the dead Stormtrooper out of the cell; his course of action was to contact the maintenance assigned to the prison block to get you. The crew was equally afraid of you, but since they know in themselves that they’ve never crossed you, they’ve got nothing to fear—although it’s the way you look at people is what scares them, it’s rather more of an upward glare than a look.

Minutes later, the Second Brother strolls into the prison block as if it was some kind of leisurely pastime. At his command, the ray-shield disappeared and he let himself in your cell.

“Hello, little thorn, can’t be late for your daily exercise,”

“Says who?”

“Says me, the Seventh Sister, the Fifth Brother, and the Grand Inquisitor,”

“I’ve never seen the Grand Inquisitor. Though, none of you have autonomy over me.”

The Second Brother stood still for a brief second, his shoulders rose as he took in a big sigh. The hand behind his back hoisted to his helmet, the duraplast clicked and the mechanisms of the mask hissed as it loosened up. This was your first time seeing the bare face of the Inquisitor.

A human male, his fair skin was an open book written with scars and bruises—a few of which were by your own hand during the exercises—a pair of brown irises twinkled but you detect the apathy in them—the expression in them was a dramatic contrast to what you imagined him to be without that mask. He seems to be growing out his shaven head, there was a short yet noticeable length of hair. From his complexion, you wagered he’d be in his thirties. He bent down while keeping his helmet in one hand and tried to parlay with you in getting out of your cell.

“While you sit in these sorry walls, we have perfect autonomy over you,” he raises his free hand, a single finger extended. For each word or two, he poked your forehead to make sure you got the point. “No matter what you think.”

“You’re still not going to make me,”

He did a series of facial expressions to highlight his mock pensiveness: rolling his eyes, bobbing his head as he made a squeaking noise with his tongue against his teeth.

“Well, we don’t have the time to be very difficult, little thorn,” he clicked. “Unless, of course, we can ask your sweet Cal Kestis to make some arrange—!”

In the blink of an eye, you repeated the same action with the Second Brother, only this time you’re using two hands to choke him using the Force. They’ve exploited your mind by using Cal and whatever predicate they can come up with to trigger you—and they loved it when you’re easily stimulated by the mere mention of his name.

They’ve fashioned you into their personal time bomb and plaything altogether, saying the “magic word” to make a puppet of you and your emotions.

“Provoke me again with his name and what you plan to do with him—it’s your neck I’m snapping next!” you angrily growled.

The Second Brother tried to fight your chokehold, but he did it with more grace and dignity that he can afford. It was never your intention to instill fear, but your aggression is what cements it to everyone in this fortress. You expected him to gag, but you heard hints of snickering while he claws at his neck; regardless, you continued choking him.

A few more minutes lapsed before you decided to let him go out of your own volition. He coughed as he fell lower to your level, you’re practically looking down on him right now as he catches his breath.

Look how pathetic… you thought.

Over the Second Brother’s shoulder, you spotted the Fifth Brother standing in front of the door, unamused and grumbling like a freighter’s engine. You shot him the same bitter look you gave to the Stormtrooper and the Second Brother.

“One last time, [Y/N], I personally don’t like repeating myself—or anyone else, for that matter.”

The Second Brother regained his composure, dusted off his armor, and stood by. When you didn’t obey the Fifth Brother, he took matters to his own hands—literally. Shoving past the Second Brother, the other Inquisitor dragged you out of your cell.

“Get up and follow.”

The Second Brother hooked his arm around yours and followed the Fifth Brother.

“Where are you taking me?”

“No questions. Just follow.”

They escorted you to the dojo again. Waiting at the center of the room is the Seventh Sister, this time she wasn’t wielding an electrobaton, she was holding her own red haloed saber. The Second Brother shoved you away to face her; she raises her hand, in it was a weapon and she tossed it to you.

Your fingers trembled, you reluctantly wrapped them around the hilt. The steely coldness eventually warmed up around your palm. The glossy, dark grey finish distorted your reflection when you held it level to your face. The female Inquisitor stepped back—so did her two other companions—and ignited her saber. Your heart dropped to your feet when you heard two more buzz in succession. All of a sudden, your knees felt wobbly, you spun around, looking at the crimson rods of light glowering over their sinister faces.

“Go on and fight us,” the Seventh Sister initiated.

She didn’t want to hear anything from you. She immediately put herself in a stance, and then the two other followed. Having no choice, you did the same—one push of a button ignited a single beam, until you spotted the second switch and the latter half emitted out of its cylinder.

The three of them ganged up on you, but it was the Second Brother and Sixth Sister who were more aggressive with you. The Fifth Brother fought with great calculation and precision, conserving his strength for the next attack only to overwhelm you while assisting the other two. Lost in the thrill of the fight, the same burst of energy returned to you.

It was addictive. You didn’t know it was poisonous, and yet you kept on using it to your advantage. You know it to be wrong, but you cannot will yourself to break away from it. Like a leech, you’ve bitten into it.

And you liked it.

“Raaarrgh!!” the Seventh Sister roared as she swings down her saber.

You deflected the two with both ends of your given saber and pushed them back. You recompose yourself into a much more proper stance, then fixate on the Seventh Sister; you’re able to match her strength—if not her caliber—and equal your odds in this duel. However, you still have the Second Brother to deal with.

“Whoa, look at her go, Sister!!” the Second Brother cackled.

The Seventh Sister comes charging right towards you, but she was blocked at the last second, and before she could even pull away to afford an attack—you planted your sole of your shoe flat onto your stomach. She staggered and clutched her torso with one hand; quickly, you turn your attention to the Second Brother, who was evidently much feistier than Seventh Sister. He took most of your time—a pair of dual-ended sabers cutting through the air, their lights curving as they’re swung by the wielders, and sparks flew to light up the rest of the room.

“I guess the tough girl is back now, huh, little thorn!? Cal Kestis would be so impressed! You could practically kill him for abandoning you!”

That did it. Relying again once more on that intoxicating energy that granted you the strength of five Jedi Masters at best, a massive push of the Force sent everyone flying—even the hulking, six-feet-or-so Fifth Brother wasn’t spared by that immense wave of energy!

Only you remained standing in the circle, you looked around—there were so many targets to choose from! You had a vendetta for each one of them. You strode towards the one who gave out the taunt first—the Second Brother—while he was still shaking off the nausea, he reacted at the last minute and lousily deflected your hits.

Left end, right end… they all flung to his direction and he could not keep up with the speed of your wielding while suppressed of fighting space. He could only block you for so long.

When you sensed his sword arm becoming weak, his jawbone met the hard sole of your shoe and rendered him incapacitated. Next was the Seventh Sister, she was just about to hoist herself up back on her feet until she saw you sprinting toward her—she had time, albeit little of it, to evade you but your sabers still clashed. She kept up with your pace—all the twirls and flashy footwork, she matched it all—but she was overwhelmed by how heavy your attacks dealt. You bore your weight on her as she deflected you and never has she ever felt so intimidated in all her life! Your eyes—now devoid of empathy and flooded with rage—blended perfectly with the redness of the saber. You were satisfied when you saw the Seventh Sister struggling, it’s plastered all over her face!

“Oh, look at you, the shrewd sister is overtaken,” you taunted, basically parroting the Second Brother’s trademark singsong. “By a damn prisoner! Hah! How does it feel to have your pride stabbed right into its gut, huh?”

Before she could even react and respond, you staggered the female Mirialan again and this time she stayed down—your fist to her cheek made sure of it. The third and final enemy: the Fifth Brother. It was brawn against brains. Strength versus dexterity. After all, what good is brute strength if you can’t even utilize it efficiently?

“Come on, big guy—I’m wide open!”

The Fifth Brother wasn’t a fan of being taunted. He charges on like a deranged Reek, his saber brandished up in the air, ready for an overhead strike but you slipped away in the blink of an eye and slashed him from behind. All three of them exchanged glances with one another and then nodded in agreement, as if they’ve had a Plan Z all along; three Inquisitors come charging towards you, but before they could lay a finger on your hair, you planted your fist hard into the tiled floor—your knuckles swelled and then bled the same time the tiles cracked.

At first, the cracks stayed only within the radius of your fist, until they multiplied and spread. From thin crosshairs to actual breakages along the surface, the marble broke into shards and was sent flying with the current of the Force energy that sourced from your punch—like seashells tugged by the waves as they’re beached to the shoreline. The shards cut through the Seventh Sister and Fifth Brother’s cheeks, they had to shield themselves with their hands—consequentially getting their palms and fingers nicked as well.

It was too strong for them to fight, rendering you untouchable until the wind died down. The loaned lightsaber which you used so skillfully fell from your grasp and clattered to the floor.

Silence. Soft, tired gasping of air. And then a single, slow series of applause followed.

Everyone searched for the applauder.

The Grand Inquisitor.

He was hauntingly terrifying, alright. Ashen as bone, blood-red streaks painted on parts of his face, and a pair of topaz-gold eyes. He walked past the felled Inquisitors and stood in front of you—his height obviously lumbered over you that you had to step back to fully acknowledge him and look him in the eyes without breaking your back.

“Well, well,” he cooed, bringing his hands behind his back. “It seems that we have a new face among us.”

You panted one last time, and used the Force to bring the haloed saber back to your hand. You poised your demeanor in front of the Pau’an, and with a dark, sinister grace—you bend your knee, the black, weathered saber is presented in your hand to the Grand Inquisitor. A smirk curled along his ribbed skin, showing a corner of his jagged, pointed teeth.

“Welcome to the fray, Twelfth Sister.”

32 notes · View notes

hilarioushilarity · 4 years

Text

(not) lost in translation pt. 2

{I am a lying liar who lies, 2-3 days my ass. You can read Part 1 here.}

The second time Alexei meets Kent Parson is at the All Star weekend that season.

When Mama and Papa had flown back to Russia, Alexei had rapidly realised that he was effectively a thousand miles away from everything he had ever known, and that:

1) Nobody around him spoke Russian; and 2) He couldn't speak English.

Alexei hates English. With a passion. He's not stupid enough to tell anyone this particular fact, but he thinks it every time he sits down for his English classes and wrestles with prepositions and adverbs, or heaven forbid, attempts to conjugate a verb. Every rule had a million exceptions, so what was even the point of the rule? English as a language was just unfair, he had decided, and he tells Mama this over the phone one month in.

She is sympathetic, in her typical Spartan manner. "You'll learn," she tells him. "Practise for at least three hours every day."

Alexei is appalled. "Mama, when am I meant to get three hours of practice each day?"

"There is always time."

He honestly doesn't know what else he expected. "Okay Mama," he says, and then turns the conversation to how stupidly big portion sizes were in America. Criticising the diets of North Americans was always guaranteed to catch her attention.

To his dismay, his father just laughs at him.

"Papa." Alexei may or may not be whining.

"Your Mama told you to just find time, didn't she," he says, when he's finally stopped cackling for long enough to take a breath.

Alexei hangs up on him.

"I'm sorry, I'm sorry," Papa says, when he calls back a minute later. The wheezing laughs have stopped, which is a relief.

"Okay," Alexei says warily.

"I mean it." His father is abruptly serious. "I'm sorry for laughing, you're in a tough situation right now. English is not an easy language to learn." They both know that his father never truly gained fluency in it - never had the chance to need it.

"It's really hard, Papa." He doesn't think he's just talking about English anymore.

"Things worth doing usually are, Alyosha," his father says gently.

Alexei chews his lip. "I don't know if I'm doing anything right."

"Are you playing good hockey?" Papa asks.

"Yes, Papa."

"You aren't bullying anyone on the ice?"

"No -"

"Working hard? Doing your English lessons? Going to all your practices on time, practising anything your coach says you need to work on?"

"Yes -"

"Then you are doing it right. And I am proud of you."

His father's voice is warm, and it curls around Alexei. He suddenly, desperately, wishes he could hug his father tightly. "Okay Papa."

"Now go and practice your English," Papa says, and Alexei does.

So hockey is the only thing he has besides torturous English lessons, and he devotes himself to it. He racks up goals and assists every game, plays a clean defensive game, and keeps his stats glowing. English smalltalk remains his nemesis but he's getting there, one pleasantry at a time. Before he knows it, he's being invited to the All Stars Weekend. He dithers over the invite for a few days, until the head of Capitals PR eventually corners him on his way out of the locker rooms.

"You should go," LaRue tells him. "It's good for building up your fanbase." He continues to go on at depth about social media presences and ticket sales. Alexei dutifully nods his way through the lecture, and ends up promising to go just to escape.

For some unknown sin in this life or a past one, he is roomed with a D-man from the Aeros who talks loudly and snores louder than a chainsaw. Alexei realises this on the first night when he lays in bed, staring at the ceiling as the red digits on the bedside clock tick over from 11 to 12, then 1. There's a snore once every three seconds, accompanied by whistling through some gap between teeth. Alexei kills half an hour searching up English sayings to describe snoring and deciding that his roommate "snores like a foghorn" before he finally gives up and rolls out of bed.

The hotel they've been put up in has an indoor gym and swimming pool. Alexei slings on a towel, sneaking out of the room before taking the lift down. On first glance, the gym is deserted, because any sane person is currently asleep. Alexei, running on no sleep, does not qualify.

Except, when he's halfway through his reps on the elliptical, a quiet voice behind him says: "Um. Hi, Alexei?"

Alexei turns around and comes face to face with Kent Parson.

What they are is nebulous at best. More than acquaintances - Kent Parson had talked to his Mama and Papa and his Mama had said Kent was a Very Nice Person. But less than friends, certainly. After the draft, Kent had gone west to the Aces and Alexei had gone east to the Capitals. He hasn't really kept track of Kent's career, but he would have to be under an actual rock to not know Kent is the only other rookie at the All Stars weekend and the NHL's current leading scorer.

"Hello," Alexei replies. There's a drop of sweat slowly rolling down his face and he's painfully aware that he probably stinks a little. Meanwhile Kent Parson looks fresh as a daisy at one in the morning. The limits of his smalltalking abilities in English remain breathtakingly small despite the benefit of six months of English tutoring, so he kind of hopes Kent takes pity on his poor, sweaty form.

Kent does not. "It's been a while. Good to see you."

Goddamnit, they're smalltalking. "Good to see you, too."

Kent looks unbothered at the lack of scintillating conversation. He rolls onto the balls of his feet, fiddling with the strap of the duffel slung over his shoulder. "So uh. How's your mum?" he says, then immediately blanches. "Shit. I didn't mean - I just -"

"Good," Alexei says, mostly to put him out of his misery. "She good."

Kent looks earnest. "Oh, that's really good to hear." And then he seems to waver a bit.

"How is family?" Alexei says, when the silence stretches on. "They come visit after draft?"

"Ah yeah." Kent visibly brightens up. "They did! It was great, we had dinner and hung out a bit, and I gave my sister your mum's autograph - she's so cool by the way, but I bet you already knew that - I'd love to thank her again."

There are just - so many words. Alexei takes a few seconds to work through the sentence. "Glad to hear sister like. Maybe you see Mama again at game with Aces?"

"Definitely," Kent says, and Alexei's heard so many people say that over the past six months, but he thinks this time he could believe it. "So, uh. What's keeping you up?"

Only the loudest snorer on the entire American continent. "Roomie." Alexei searches for the words. "Snoring like foghorn."

Kent winces. "Jeez, I know what you mean. Did you try poking him to get him to roll over?"

"To scared to poke," Alexei admits. "Big guy."

"Who are you rooming with?"

"Winkler?"

"Fuck, yeah, he's a big dude. Better not poke him."

Alexei sighs. "Snore so loud - and whistle too. Like train." At Kent's blank look, he tries: "Choo choo?"

"Choo - oh god, you mean like a steam engine?"

Alexei pulls out his phone in answer. "How spell that? Steam engine?" He dutifully plugs in the letters Kent rattles off, and hits translate. "Oh. Yes. He steam engine."

"Heh," Kent says. "I double dog dare you to say that to him." He must catch the look of utter incomprehension on Alexei's face, because he quickly backtracks. "Not up with the slang yet? Sorry. I meant, you should tell him that."

"But why?" Alexei doesn't want to get punched.

"As a joke," Kent adds hastily. "It's funny, because we know it's stupid so we wouldn't do it."

English was just ridiculous. "Okay," Alexei tries. "Double dog dare you cycle on elliptical, see who faster."

"That's not..." Kent trails off. He smiles, then shakes his head. "That's not how it works. But we'll work on it," he assures Alexei, with a firm pat on his shoulder.

It's worlds away from the way the Caps' coach tends to roll his eyes heavenward when Alexei goes left when he should go right, or his English tutor, who is nice enough but is prone to banging her head against the table a little when Alexei fumbles the conjugation on a verb. "Not now," Alexei says. "Later?"

Kent checks his watch and he actually looks surprised, like the complete lack of other people didn't clue him in. "Wow, it's pretty late, isn't it?"

Unbelievable. "Why you up?"

"Got caught up practising."

Alexei sideeyes him. "Practising?"

Kent flushes a little. "Practising my stick handling. Shooting accuracy."

Alexei can't help but boggle at him. "You practising? At 1AM?"

"I couldn't sleep," Kent says, a little defensively.

"You crazy," Alexei decides, but there's a lot of fondness that must be apparent to even Kent, who looks less offended than he does a mildly grumpy, like the family cat when he accidentally stepped on her tail as a child. "But you wipe ice with everyone, so you champion crazy."

"Damn straight I'm the champion crazy," Kent says, planting his hands on his hips like a dork. "Yeah, laugh it up, I'll definitely be wiping the ice with you."

Alexei pretends to cower. "Okay, Kent Parson, I try best not cry on ice then."

"You will be bawling your eyes out," Kent says with promise, and then looks so affronted when Alexei just doubles over, breathless with laughter.

"I believe you," Alexei says to the ground, from where he's still bent over trying to catch his breath. "Cry many tears."

"You better," Kent says, but then he's laughing helplessly too, dropping his duffel. "Oh god, I really am champion crazy."

Alexei reaches over to pat him on the back. "Is okay, still like, even if Kent Parson practice hockey at one in morning."

"You don't think I'm too crazy?" Perhaps it's meant to be joking, but Alexei can't help but look up sharply.

"Never. You think Crosby best because he slack off?"

"I don't think he's ever stayed up until 1 because he was nervous about All Stars," Kent says, then bites his lip.

"You nervous?" Alexei asks. Kent hesitates. "Why you nervous?"

"I just - it's been a lot," Kent finally says. He's looking to the side, staring at the elliptical. Alexei waits, and Kent says in a rush: "I feel like I have to be the best, or - or else -"

"Not have to say what," Alexei says gently. "Not make you say."

Kent scowls. "It's stupid. Everyone's thinking it, they just don't say it. That I'm the second choice."

At the Draft, Alexei had known vaguely that Kent Parson and another boy called Jack Zimmermann had widely been slated to go first and second - in either order. It was true that every analyst had put the latter in first place, and that when Aces called Kent Parson's name there had been a slight pause in the audience's murmuring. Kent's smile had been strained as he left their table.

Alexei's stood across from Kent on the ice before. He's watched countless hours of tape of the Aces' play and by proxy, of Kent. Kent Parson on the ice is a force of nature, skating circles around defence and sinking pucks into the net as easy as breathing. And in his heart of hearts, he thinks the margin between first and second had been far smaller than most people thought.

But now, under the harsh gym lights that highlight the remaining softness of his jaw and the dark patches beneath his eyes, Alexei realises that Kent's still just a kid. Alexei's just a kid. They're both just teenagers. And there's very little of the player who had breezed past Alexei at the last Caps game with the Aces, or of the player who had mercilessly crushed their four game winning streak without batting an eye. Under the padding and past all the hype, Kent was far from the figure he cut on ice and as vulnerable as any other human.

"Even if people say second choice, what matter?" Alexei says. "You first. You here now. Play well. Maybe bit annoy on ice but not bully. And seem nice, polite to Mama. Thinking of sister even at draft. Get autograph for her. That matter. Not other people."

He hopes he hasn't overdone it - perhaps Kent wasn't looking for a heart-to-heart in the hotel gym at 1AM. But instead of taken aback Kent looks - a little watery.

"Why you cry?" Alexei is horrified.

"I'm not crying," Kent sniffs. "I'm not."

Alexei bites his tongue. "Uh okay." He politely looks away as Kent wipes his eyes.

"I'm not saying I can't cry," Kent begins, which Alexei takes as his cue that it's safe to look back at him. His eyes are just slightest bit red, and even that's only if you know what to look for. “I just try not to cry in front of others.”

"Okay," Alexei says cautiously.

Kent takes a deep breath. "Thank you."

"Welcome," Alexei replies automatically, then says: "But. For what?"

Kent stares at him. "For - listening? For not being an asshole about the fact I'm still some nervy rookie?"

Christ. People thanked each other for things like that in America? "No need thank," Alexei says. Then, desperate to change the subject, he adds: "So we agree! No need for nervous! You real KVP."

"The what?"

"KVP." Alexei gestures. "I see on Twitter - they calling you 'the Real KVP'".

"That's not - " Kent splutters. "That's my name, Alexei."

Alexei tries not wince. "Oh. Oops, sorry."

"Why are you sorry?" Kent brings out his phone, thumbing at something on the screen. He eventually holds out his phone, open to a websearch. "See? It's a joke on MVP. That's 'Most Valuable Player'."

"Oh," Alexei says again. "Make sense. Sometimes miss reference - thank you for explaining."

Kent stows away his phone, corners of his mouth twitching upwards again. "You've only been in the US for what, six months? Your English is great. If you put me in Russia I would probably just turn around and go back to the US."

"You miss good food then," Alexei tuts. "Russian food is best food."

"Hell no, I've seen what you guys count as soup. I'm not touching borscht with a ten-foot pole."

"Borscht is best soup!" Alexei tries to sound outraged.

"Look man, all I'm saying is that anything that pink should not be eaten."

Blasphemy. "You try pirozhki then? Small, baked -" He gropes around for the word, then gives up and calls up the translator app on his phone. "Dumpling."

"I've never had that," Kent says, but he at least looks intrigued. "What did you call it? Pay-roz-kay?"

His accent is actually appalling. "Pirozhki," Alexei corrects.

Kent frowns. "Poe-roz-ki?"

"Pirozhki"

"Poh-rosh-ki?"

Alexei nods in approval. "Good, sounds good."

"I like the sound of baked dumplings," Kent says. "Mm. Pirozkhi. I might go see if there's any places that do it in Vegas."

"Let me know if yes." Alexei nudges him. "I come try when Caps play Aces."

"You got it."

Alexei cuts off any further conversation with the embarrassingly loud yawn that escapes him then.

"Shit, it's like 1:30AM." Kent winces. "We have to get up at like 7 tomorrow - today? Holy crap we better go to sleep."

Alexei levers himself up, gathering his towel and bottle. "Hope not fall asleep on skates tomorrow."

"How about I check you if I see you dropping off," Kent suggests, then snickers at Alexei's raised eyebrow. "Bad idea?"

"Sure can check me?" Alexei makes a show of looking Kent up and down. He holds his index finger and thumb about ten centimetres apart. "So small."

"You asshole," Kent says, but he's laughing. "I'm not short, you're just a giant."

"If say so," Alexei shrugs. They start towards the elevator banks. "If help sleep at night."

"Fuck you, I sleep really well at night," Kent says petulantly. Alexei eyes the shadows beneath his eyes.

"I believe, I believe," he says instead with his best shit-eating grin. They get in the lift. "Okay, floor?"

Kent reaches over and pushes the button for 15. "You?"

"Twelve. Thank you." Kent nods, and they start moving up.

"So see you tomorrow, yes?"

"Yeah." Kent shoulders his duffel a little more firmly. "Be prepared to cry like a baby."

Alexei flaps his hands, just as the lift doors open on his floor. "Yeah, yeah, I cry so much."

The smile Kent gives him is small, but very real. "Good night Alexei."

"Good night," Alexei says, stepping out and turning to wave goodbye. The doors shut on Kent's smile, and Alexei stands there for a second, the airconditioning cool against his slightly sweaty neck.

"Hopefully not cry too much," he says to himself, before heading back to his room.

#kent parson #alexei mashkov #(not) lost in translation #patater #capichewrites

47 notes · View notes

desdemonafictional · 4 years

Text

Guess WHAT I’m doing hxh fic again, we’ll see if it goes anywhere, but here’s a bit of action/adventure

Gon had left his home island in the eastern sea and arrived on the mainland just in time to catch a ride on a caravan headed west, towards the capital of the Seaside Empire. The last letter his aunt had received from his father was marked with the seal of the Capital, sent almost twelve years before, and attached to a dagger that Mito had presented to Gon, reluctantly, on his birthday.

“So what did the letter say?” Kurapika had asked him, as they sat around the campfire that first night with the caravan.

“Well…” Gon had shrugged with some embarrassment. “It said I should take the dagger for an inheritance and not chase after him, since he’s as good as dead to me now that he left me behind for someone else to raise.”

Kurapika’s eyebrows went up. “And yet here you are, chasing after him.”

Gon wrinkled his nose. “I just don’t think it’s a very good trade! I’m going to find him, and give him the dagger back, and make him show me how to be a treasure hunter like he is. And then it’ll be fair.”

“Suppose he doesn’t want to teach you?” Kurapika asked.

“He will,” Gon said, with perfect confidence. “I’m his son! When he sees how serious I am, he’ll have to do it.”

On Kurapika’s right, Leorio was slumped back against a stump and examining the dagger in question, holding it up against the firelight. “Sure doesn’t seem like anything special,” he remarked. “Maybe it’s just some junk he picked up. Maybe he isn’t even a real treasure hunter.”

“He is!” Gon said. “Everyone says he was an amazing treasure hunter, even before he left! He killed a dragon when he was only fifteen years old! That’s amazing, isn’t it?”

Since that first night, on the coast, their caravan had come many days travel deeper into the mainland. The passed through the swamplands, through a great rushing river that had carried away a dozen less cautious of their fellow travelers , and was passing now through the Ruined Lands, a wilderness spotted at every turn with the wreckage of some ancient stone empire.

About a day’s journey into the Ruined Lands, the poplars and willows and birds gave way to a standing stone circle straight in the middle of their path.

“At this point,” the head of the caravan—a seasoned merchant from the north—announced to the group at large, “we’ll have to go around! It’s bad luck to travel through the circle, and the road ahead is rife with all kinds of danger. They say a dragon lives inside one of the burial mounds that way, and the last thing we want is to be noticed by a dragon.”

There was a ragged shout of boos from the crowd. With their many pack animals and unwieldy wooden cartwheels, none of the travelers relished the idea of lugging their possessions through the narrow foot trails and underbrush of the forest. While they were embroiled in argument with the head of the caravan, Gon and his friends hung back from the mess and surveyed the hill with the standing circle with some interest.

“I suppose the road must lead through it for a reason,” Kurapika said, considering the deeply worn ruts in the turf at his foot. “Maybe there was originally a pilgrimage that ran this way.”

“Pretty impressive it’s still standing,” Leorio said. “But I’m more interested in those burial mounds he mentioned. I wonder if they’ve already been looted, or if there’s still any treasure left in there.”

“Did you miss the part where he mentioned a dragon?” Kurapika asked dryly. “Or can’t you hear anything past the sound of cash registers?”

While Leorio scoffed, Gon scaled the side of a vardo wagon. From its curved wooden roof, he was able to see past the circle and into the countryside ahead, where the heather gave way to woods again.

There was sudden shouting and banging from the other side of the wagon, and Gon slid across the roof just in time to see a trio of travelers shove the caravan head down onto the turf.

“Listen here,” one of them said, while the other two bore down on the more experienced traveler, “we’ve got an appointment to make in the capital, and we’re not about to lose a day mucking around in the shrubs with all these donkeys and chicken coops. You’re gonna take us through the straightway, and you’re gonna do it now.”

Gon climbed to his feet. “Hey!” he shouted down. “Leave him alone, he’s just doing his job!”

In a moment, Kurapika and Leorio had rushed around the side of the vardo to see what the fuss was about. Leorio stiffened; Kurapika reached for his batons. Immediately a handful of random travelers reached for their own weapons, short swords and hooks and hammers, and closed ranks around the belligerent trio.

“Everyone, please,” the caravan head said, one elbow planted in the dirt. He lifted the other hand in a plea for peace. “A caravan should never quarrel within itself. We are all we have out here in this wilderness.”

The skinnier one of the trio planted his boot in the man’s back and ground down. “Fine by us, we don’t want a fight. We just wanna get going. You gonna do the smart thing, old man?”

There was a tightness in the air, as Leorio and Kurapika both drew themselves down into a coiled stance, ready to spring. The share of travelers who had sided with the trio, more than a third of the whole group, also tensed.

“Yes,” the headman said, at last, “fine, we will go on with the straightway. If that’s what the group wants, that’s what we’ll do. Let me up.”

The tension remained, as the trio let the headman up and the man brushed himself off. Gon jumped down between Kurapika and Leorio, who were putting away their own weapons with some reluctance.

“That isn’t right,” Gon said. “He’s the most experienced traveler, if he says the road is dangerous, we should be listening to him.”

“I agree,” Kurapika said. “All the same, there’s strength in numbers. I would be hesitant to break off from the caravan, even if I knew the way to the capital perfectly myself.”

“We’re at the mercy of the whole stupid mob of ‘em,” Leorio agreed, his eyes narrowing.

And it was on that grim note that they set off again, amongst the rolling coops and covered wagons, and passed beneath the wide stone lintel of the standing circle.

Kurapika, as he had eventually revealed, was on his way to the capital to become an enforcer; that was to say, a warrant officer, a hound of the empire. Leorio was traveling to find a doctor willing to teach him medicine, and hopefully apprentice himself to the craft. Neither could afford to delay their travel another season, even if the caravan they found themselves attached to was in conflict with their own principles.

In the woods deep beyond the standing circle, beneath the canopy of seasonless beeches, Gon paused mid-step and turned his head north.

“What?” Leorio said, bending down. “You hear something?”

“What could he possibly hear over this racket,” Kurapika murmured, as the coop of squawking chickens rolled along behind him.

Gon shook his head. “I smell…” He frowned. “I smell sweat. And old blood.”

Leorio and Kurapika met each other’s worried gazes at the same time. “Let’s get the headman,” Kurapika said, just as the first arrow flew out of the treeline and embedded itself in the post of the chicken coop.

In the same moment, the three of them grabbed hands and threw themselves through the gap in the train of wagons, taking shelter behind the wall of the next vardo as a hail of arrows punched into the whole north facing side of the wagon train.

“Bandits!” Kurapika shouted, his voice almost lost in the eruption of chaos.

“We need to get out of the open,” Leorio said. The checkered brocade of his carpet bag swung as he gestured to the southern treeline. “We’re sitting ducks out here.”

“The headman,” Gon said, suddenly. “We have to get him.”

“Gon, we don’t have—” Kurapika looked down just soon enough to realize Gon was no longer there, “—time. Oh.”

He looked at Leorio. Leorio let out a sharp breath and then straightened up. “Tell you the truth, I wouldn’t feel right leaving the guy either. He tried to warn us.”

“Yes,” Kurapika said, turning to the front end of the caravan. “Yes, I suppose so.”

The whooping, mounted shapes of bandits were pouring out of the woods—probably not more than a dozen, but in their staggered chaos they had the feeling of being an endless flood to the unprepared travelers. It was pandemonium as Gon and his friends raced to reach the headman; animals in disarray, humans shouting and scrambling for control of them. A mule tore free of his leadline and broke for the southern woods, scattering wax-wrapped packets across the ground as he went.

They found the headman slumped and clutching an arrow embedded in his upper arm, blood blooming through his blue wool sleeve. He looked up as Gon reached him, confusion and pain in a mixture across his features.

“Let us help you, sir,” Gon said, and braced the man so that he could get to his feet again.

“Do you know anything about these bandits?” Kurapika asked. “How they operate?”

“I don’t know this band,” the headman told them, his voice tight. “I don’t know if they kill travelers or leave them alive.”

“Well let’s not stick around to find out,” Leorio said, and tossed his carpetbag against his back.

Kurapika hooked the headman’s uninjured arm over his own shoulder and then they were off, darting across the ditch and over the shoulder of the road. There was a shout from somewhere behind them; a twang, and the dire whistle of fletching passing through air. Kurapika was caught with dread—what could he do but keep going, even with the weight of the headman dragging him down? They had rescued the man, it would be the height of dishonor to abandon him now.

The whistle broke suddenly into a gruesome thock as it hit human flesh, but it was neither Kurapika nor the headman who cried out. Leorio let out a pained grunt, from much closer behind Kurapika than he had been before.

They hit the treeline. Another arrow embedded itself in the trunk of a tree, and then they were safe among the old growth of the forest, beyond the reach of arrows. Kurapika could finally turn his head and see what had become of Leorio.

White faced, grimacing, Leorio was only a few steps behind. At first there was no sign of the arrow, but then it dawned on Kurapika that the shaft of the arrow had passed through the carpetbag over Leorio’s shoulder and buried itself in his shoulder blade.

“Oh,” Kurapika said. “You’re…”

Leorio’s grimace twisted into something echoing a smile. “Don’t sweat it,” he said. “It’s not that deep. Better me than you guys, anyway.”

“Leorio…” Kurapika said.

Gon appeared at his elbow, making a thoughtful circle around his back. “We need to get that loose. Normally it’s better to leave them in, but the shaft is pinning your bag to your back, and you won’t be able to let go of the handle or the weight will snap it.”

“We can’t do it out here,” Leorio retorted. “Who knows if they’ll send someone after us. We need shelter, somewhere defensible.”

Gon tapped his boot a couple times, and then he said, “I’ll scout ahead, I’m faster and uninjured. You guys just keep moving south, and I’ll find you again once I’ve found a place.”

“Very well,” Kurapika said. “Go on ahead. I’m sure with your experience you can find something suitable for all of us.”

“You sure?” Leorio said. “That just leaves the two of us.”

Kurapika smiled at him, just past the bend of the headman’s elbow. “I think we’ll do just fine together.”

Leorio went red. Kurapika started moving forward again, leaving him where he stood.

#leopika #Hunter X Hunter

17 notes · View notes

captainkurosolaire · 4 years

Text

Passion’s Twist

🎵 Music 🎵 In a chilling pitch confronted right before the shadowy seated past the organ’s conductor pausing clearly detecting the Captain’s arrival. Underestimating and not paying attention to his vessel’s intruder that’s just how the former gap and dynamic of what was so known frail prior a plant that’s existence was only to be stomped on. "This is a world where we barter for freedom do you remember that price?" “Blood." A signalized assurance that this was inescapable as was their pact before going into a war-zone now they were the parties involved and they’d spill. For beliefs, for principals, for freedom stands the mightiest and tallest. It was time to see what they do with their own respective. The Betrayer obviously chose to dominate and like any tyrannical with power they’d enslave any beneather.

Fiendishly hands came unraveled from the organ The Betrayer’s figure came unglued, a side-stand with a pipe was dragged off rest. A cheap and forward lunge came darting from out through a trench coat the rugged Midlander of porcelain complexion revealed before a lighting strike nearby a dangling choker carrying a tiny dirk near his torso a message of his inner characteristics an untrustworthy backstabber. Instinctively Captain recoiled defensively to block grabbing one grip between him and the blunt object. However he had forgotten as often a turncoat always carries under their sleeves pocketed disaster. Shivs drew out and plunged into the forearm deeply of the Seeker causing him to bellow out in agony. Two inserted before Kuro bounced back on his feet. Stammering as fitting First blood was drawn. He pried the steel from his arms chunking them like darts to the owner. Who batted them with the lead pipe. Shaking his head and fighting off the fatigue settling quickly in that was telling him to fall to rest. Kuro stood back up and charging in grit a tucked under palm like a hand holding out for fountain water drew to collect his own blood when he closed in the distance he’d stop suddenly and slather it forward as like tar to blind using his own blood. Now another grunt echoed back from opposition aimlessly the pipes swung towards the direction. Kuro taking the wrists and swinging around and elbowing to the heart of Bellum caused him to disarm before growling out and now charging also back. He’d shove Kuro towards the organ and then continue thrashing and wailing on him banging and drumming the skull of the Miqo’te against the keyboard making them both flounder from the tune that sought to deprive them of their hearing. Shouting back, “Ye should’ve stayed dead!!!“ As his adrenaline and rage spiked his memories recalling his fondness and their bond that he squandered to the waste side. However it seemed he hadn’t truly buried it far enough under internal shallow. A daze rang against the Seeker who barely heard through who hung and began curling to block his face against being slammed the boarded prints grazed his cheeks. He’d kick back hitting the kneecap of the blindly rampant and then capitalize on hitting a below the belt hit. Staggering back and wincing he bought enough time before both them in the center room locked up again. Punching each-other senseless square in the face unguarded blow after blow they began swelling up already. Every emotion tossed back they felt the depletion in their vitality with each landed impact. Kuro staggering and teetering allowed opportunity for the Dirk on The Betrayer’s necklace to be removed and hastily close in. Kuro barely grabbed his wrists in-time, the razor literally an ilm off from hitting his pupil. His leather boot squished and stood on his armed opponent to keep him locked in and prevent from scooting off. They both in guttural wrenches looked to hold decisiveness. Kuro’s eye’s glowered brighter than before as his pupil spun and shaped into using his gifted amplified Star-Sight. He cross-chopped in the neck Bellum losing his hold as the tiny blade disappeared, after it lost from his grips seemingly disappearing in vanish. Captain in pure sharp pain cried a shout back at it ran against his face in his reflective pupil the knife was lodged and vaulted into a pocketed of him. He’d send it back to him magically drifting out of his palm and placing it against the thorax of The Betrayer putting him into a ending situation. Instead however of slashing or leading more bloodshed Captain as that wasn’t ever his aim, he pushed with every bit of his physical and animistic other portion of him as his runic forearm glowed around with engravings lending from his every core.

As Bellum was tossed by Feral Kuro towering over protruding in crimson lightly under his bottom lip and fall on his rump the crooked Warlord getting his payment back out of his conqueror none came close but this ghost standing before haunting him, he was beside himself,"Why'd ye blasted come back dammit!?" The gravity of loss was felt his muscles too weak to muscle or string up defenselessly.

With sorrow lineament in amber hues, "When you love something you know not even the currents cannot keep you apart. In my case, someone..." Right as Bellum's pupil's extended a love message sent in poetic fashion realizing this wasn't grudge for scorned pride but unspoken feelings that were mutual, like a gun shot he'd drum a booming chin kick to Bellum's slowly raising and weakened frame sliding up upside the wall he was pent against gathering right in position before a stained window all the pressure and force sent him shattering and splintering his back and mind rolling to faded black, the pop heard across the jaw in weighted heartfelt emotion.

Right before the unconscious and Bellum's lost defeated corpse sunk below in semblance of the same treatment the Captain endured when exiled and being beaten in his parley, calloused hands studiously latched to his opponent's ankles pulled back with a merciful save.

"All this that transpired was me confronting you; a past. I wasn't strong enough prior for either of our goals or ambitions, I faltered as th' Captain everyone deserved or saw that was needed and should've properly led. Well here's me reclaiming a rewrite by pages of one."

He'd cradle somberly in kinship, laying back and putting his former First Matey into his bed and heartily deliver a 'Last' smooch on the forehead in his restless state stained in their blood they went to war for the value in what was shared. Compassion unleashed in it's own potent strength now seen.

Battered, bruised from heads to toe, he still tasted that hinted of metallic blood in his mouth and limped outside against a Sunlight departing from the aftermath. It marked this was over and settled as was the pouring storm. Everything read in clear-skies. Taking in a breathe for his next destination to register, "How peculiar... I think I've the unique mood for some tea, think I heard some rumbling over yonder. That'll hold fer me." His head readjusting with the winds against his sun-kissed frame as his gaze held towards the direction of The Shroud’s that’s where his ‘Next’ was drawn.

🎵 End 🎵

[Previous]

#Part Finale #Tales of the Goldbrand #The First #The Last #Betrayer #Captain #The Writ #Closure #FFXIV #Creative Writing #Offender #Waged Importance #Unspoken #Pirate Affairs #Final Fantasy XIV #Never End X Treasures

37 notes · View notes

semperintrepida · 4 years

Text

The Sellout, chapter two

two: the big reveal

Kassandra sipped her coffee and surveyed the Portland skyline: the muddy river far below, Mount Hood backlit by sunrise skies as soft and pink as a kitten's tongue, and the laughably light traffic skating along I5. Roofs and trees, then trees in greater and greater numbers until they made a velvety green carpet all the way to the mountains. Portland had to be the smallest big city she'd ever lived in.

She sipped again, letting the coffee's warmth ward off the chill from the polished concrete floor beneath her feet, and she wandered away from the unbroken expanse of floor-to-ceiling windows that formed the eastern wall of her condo, back to the table where her laptop waited for her to put the finishing touches on the Yelp review she'd been dying to write since yesterday afternoon.

After visiting fifty — no, closer to a hundred — coffee shops in the month she'd lived here so far, she'd never experienced one quite like Cliffhanger Coffee. The latte she'd ordered was damn near perfect, but the coffee snob capital of the US was full of near-perfect lattes. It wasn't full of beautiful, dark-haired women with fire in their eyes who could pull espresso shots while throwing volleys of sharp, sharp words at the first sign of a threat.

Despite turning up the dials on her charm and attentiveness, Kassandra had gotten skewered almost as soon as she'd opened her mouth. After two years of living with Pacific Northwest passive aggressiveness, the woman's flat-out, in-your-face aggressiveness had hit Kassandra like the first taste of a sea breeze after years in the desert.

She'd savored every sip of that latte while walking up Belmont back to her car, and later on, she'd fallen asleep thinking about the woman's sharp words, the muscled lines of her forearms, and how they'd disappeared into blackwork tattoos that ran under the rolled-up sleeves of her flannel shirt. Trees on one arm and plants on the other, ferns giving way to some kind of vine, twisting in intricate lines on her skin...

Kassandra shook the thought away and focused on the text she'd written. Come for the delicious drinks, stay if the barista likes you... She tapped a finger against her chin in thought, then typed out one final sentence before she clicked "Post Review."

She examined her handiwork with a satisfied grin, then finished off the last of her coffee. Maybe she could squeeze in a visit to the other side of the river after her one o'clock planning meeting downtown. She picked up her phone.

Dessa answered in the middle of the first ring. "Good morning, Kassandra." She'd been Kassandra's assistant long enough to know her working hours went from seven a.m. to seven p.m. and often beyond.

"Dessa. Good morning. How's my two to four looking this afternoon?"

Quiet click-clicks as Dessa brought up her calendar. "You've got a one-on-one with Trevor Adams from two-thirty to three-thirty."

"Reschedule him to early next week."

"Consider it done."

"Any messages for me?"

"Kevin would like you to call, but he says it's not urgent."

Kassandra snorted. A CEO's not urgent merely meant right now instead of yesterday. "Coordinate a call with Lisa so I can talk to him at his earliest convenience." Lisa, his long-suffering admin assistant, who'd followed him from Microsoft to Juniper and every other stop along the way.

"It'll probably be around eight-thirty."

"That works." She drummed her fingers on the tabletop. "How're things back at the ranch?"

A sigh. "Markos has been looking for you."

Kassandra rolled her eyes. "He can make a calendar request like everyone else."

"I told him that, but you know how he is."

She did, all too well. He liked his meetings with her to be in person and off the record, like he was some big-shot politician instead of a middling marketing executive. "I'll be on site tomorrow morning. If he weasels by again, tell him he can buy me lunch."

"Will do. Anything else you need?"

"That's it for now. Thanks, Dessa."

She gave one last smirking glance at Yelp, then closed the browser tab and pulled up Outlook. The number of messages in her inbox had reached quadruple digits, and she made a mental note to spend some time cleaning it up later. She scrolled around until she found the email she wanted, then picked up her phone again. "Hi, Evelyn. It's Kassandra. Ready to start crunching those square footage numbers on the southeast flagship?"

.oOo.

A little after two o'clock, Kassandra turned her Audi R8 onto the looping ramp that led up to the Morrison Bridge, and just past the apex of the curve, she punched the gas and grinned as the big V10 began to howl. The acceleration shoved her hard into her seat, and it was like sitting in a recliner strapped to a rocket, more than making up for the fact that the car only came with an automatic transmission. No matter. If she wanted to shift gears herself, she had motorcycles for that.

She found a place to park on a side street off Belmont, slung her laptop bag over her shoulder, then backtracked a couple of blocks to the building that housed Cliffanger Coffee. The neighborhood wore its light industrial roots proudly: lots of brick and corrugated metal, and the coffeeshop's building was no exception. The ground floor units had lofted ceilings, but there were two more floors above them that looked like they'd been converted into apartments sometime in the last forty years. Likely rent controlled. Probably what had kept the owner from tearing it all down and putting up a mixed use development in its place.

A development on a street corner like this could net tens of millions.

The corner unit was occupied by a store selling overpriced furniture, and she scanned the price tags through the windows as she passed: five-hundred-dollar end tables and six-thousand-dollar couches. The store had probably been open for less than a year. She wondered what had been in its place a decade ago, when the coffee shop next door had moved in and nudged this neighborhood a little further down the path of gentrification.

A slate-colored sign bearing the words "Cliffhanger Coffee" hung over the door, the bold white lettering in a font that was clean and timeless rather than trendy, set over an angular slash that was more suggestive of a cliff than explicit.

Kassandra pushed the door open and stepped inside. Busier today, with customers dotting the interior tables, and the same three people from yesterday seated at the couches, deep in conversation. The woman — the owner, Kassandra reminded herself — was at the register, smiling as she handed a cup to a customer. At the sound of the door opening, her gaze slid from the man, to Kassandra, then back again.

The woman's smile faded as soon as the customer turned his back to her. She wore a blue and white plaid button-down with the sleeves rolled up to her elbows, and tight black jeans. The buckle of her belt glinted silver under the menu board's lights. "What do you want?" she asked as Kassandra walked up to the counter, her gaze as opaque as smoked glass, and Kassandra knew she wasn't really asking about a drink.

"I'll take a double shot, bone dry cappuccino, please."

The woman's eyes narrowed a fraction as Kassandra's weaponized order hit its mark. "Four dollars and thirty cents," she said flatly, slamming her fingertip into the register's touchscreen so hard its plastic casing creaked. This time, Kassandra took a good look at the woman's hands: long and slender, implying fine bones within, but her fingers were wrapped with muscles, as were her wrists and forearms, powerful lines disappearing into black foliage and vines that climbed up her arm.

That kind of muscle didn't come from pulling shots at an espresso machine — it came from training and effort. Kassandra knew it well; she wore it herself from her neck to her calves, earned it in the weight room and on the pitch, and, once everyone figured out she'd grow up to be tall instead of fast, on the basketball court. The woman had probably started young at whatever sport it was, but she was too tall and lean to be a gymnast, and no soccer player who wasn't a goalkeeper had wrists like that, and she wasn't tall enough to be a keeper anyway...

Kassandra realized she was staring, and her fingers fumbled at her wallet inside her suit jacket's pocket. It took her two tries to pull a twenty from the cash in her money clip, and she made herself take a slow breath before she pushed it across the counter. "Can you make that drink for here, please?" she asked once she'd regained her poise.

The woman tilted her head and eyed the twenty. Her look could have shattered concrete. Then the twenty disappeared into the cash drawer and a stack of coins and bills took its place. "You might as well have a seat," she said, tossing the words over her shoulder as she moved to the espresso machine.

And just like the day before, the woman's shroud of irritation fell away as soon as she focused her full attention on making the drink, her eyes lighting up with a clean, unburdened joy. This woman was the one Kassandra wanted to talk to. She wanted to ask, Does it feel the same way for you too? It was beating everyone in the paint to a rebound, or hitting a holeshot on the racetrack, that flowing perfection where everything is just so and all is right in the world. Kassandra had spent a lifetime chasing it.

One espresso shot and two full pitchers of steamed milkfoam later, the drink slid across the counter. "Bone dry," the woman said in a voice to match.

Kassandra picked up the cup, murmuring her thanks before she drifted around the perimeter of the shop. Lots of brick and exposed metal, softened by green plants. Real ones. This place would Instagram well. She sipped the drink, the hot espresso tunneling through a thick layer of fluffy foam, completely free of milk and its diluting effects. Yesterday's latte had been near-perfect, but this drink was perfection in every way, its components correctly proportioned, the shot ecstatically good. She needed to find out who the woman's coffee roaster was.

A set of shelves crammed with books occupied much of the back wall, under a small, hand-lettered sign reading take one, leave one. Past the shelves, a bulletin board hung over a small self-service bar that held carafes of cream and a variety of sweeteners. Kassandra's eye lingered on a line of brightly colored stickers running along the edge of the board: Best of Portland 2010, Best of Portland 2011, 2012, 2013... all the way to last year, 2017.

She chose a table against the wall that was mostly hidden from the counter's line of sight, pulled her laptop from her bag, sat down, and pretended to get to work.

A steady stream of customers passed through the doors of the shop, despite the doldrums of the mid-afternoon, and the thread of tension wound tight around the woman's voice began to loosen as she filled orders and chatted with customers. Once, she even laughed, low and round and rich, the sound fuming in the air like a good bourbon. Until that moment, Kassandra wasn't sure the woman was capable of it.

The shop began to empty out as the clock swept past three. Kassandra packed her laptop away and carefully set the empty cup into the bus tub under the self-service bar. She strolled over to the counter, ignoring the hostile glances from the regulars at the couches. There was a jar full of business cards next to the register she hadn't noticed before. Enter to win a ten-pack of drinks written in strong, angular lettering.

The woman turned to her and crossed her arms.

"The drink was perfect," Kassandra said.

Silence.

"I didn't catch your name."

"I didn't give it to you."

Not this way, Kassandra wanted to say. Let's not do it like this. Let's just talk. Tell me about your coffee: who grew it, where it came from, and what drew you to doing this? Because she wanted to see that bright joy return to the woman's eyes instead of the anger living there now. "You don't like me at all, do you?"

"Have you given me a reason to like you?"

"Have I given you a reason not to?" Her brows knit with real confusion. "If I've caused any offense, I'm sorry."

"You seem to think that I have to give you the time of day because you're dropping twenties on drinks."

That stung. "Consider it compensation for wasting your precious time, then." She had tried to be nice from several angles, but had bounced off the mirror finish of the woman's anger every time. Nice didn't work on everyone. She'd keep her interest professional then, and run a different play from the playbook. "I guess you really wanted that fifth star," she said, and then she reached into her laptop bag and fished out one of her business cards, and she smirked as she caught a glimpse of a siren's enigmatic smile looking out from a familiar green circle. She locked eyes with the woman and threw the card into the jar by the till. "See you later."

As she walked out the door and onto the sidewalk, she couldn't help but grin. She would have loved to see the woman's face as she read the words on the card:

Kassandra Agiadis Vice President of International Real Estate Development Starbucks Coffee Company

Chapter two of The Sellout. Continued in chapter three...

#kyssandra #kassandra #ac odyssey #coffee shop au #god this fic is such an indulgence lol #the sellout

29 notes · View notes