#from which you stole some feathers. and then you went in their fucked up shed that apparently had asbestos

[jarvis-cockhead]

.

#found out last night someone i knew at uni died and its odd. really odd #didnt know them well enough to really feel grief but always intended to hang out with them more #follow each other on spotify & their last listened to artist is one of my favourite bands #i would have liked to have known them better. yeah #really feel for the ppl who were closest to them like im sad but as i said its not like. actual grief #we hear abt other students dying every now and then but its never someone you knew personally or someone whos house you went to #& you meowed at them and they got scared because they said theyre a barking household. and they showed you the dead buzzard in their garden #from which you stole some feathers. and then you went in their fucked up shed that apparently had asbestos #yeah. i just wish id had more opportunities to know them. me and another friend always said we should hang out with them more #man it sucks. which is an understatement rlly but u know #and now its kind of just like. this is a thing that has happened #and i probably wont rlly feel the impact until coming off placement year next year because then ill actually notice that theyre not there #never had anyone in my peer group die before. really fucking weird #really hope theyre at peace now and all. and im glad one of my friends who knew them more i checked in on is doing alright #i mean i say im not grieving but i have cried and am crying but i also cry easily or when i hear people i dont even know have died #but also i do miss them and i wish i could see them again

[mauserfrau]

Eyeshine, Part 1 - Bordertober

HEY KIDS WHO WANTS TO SEE THE TWINS ON THEIR SHIP HEADED TO PANDORA.

IT’S REALLY TINY.

AND THEY’RE HAVING ENGINE TROUBLE.

...or are they?

Lots of Tyreen eating and some other general nastiness from her.  Appreciably Claustrophobic.  

The jump brought them to a space so empty it didn’t even seem black.  No— darkness rested between other stars, far off and distant.  Here was a clear nothingness, out of reach of the rest of the universe.  

Tyreen drifted at his shoulder.  He could feel her fuming.

Neither of them had made much sound since they’d stopped.  The lights were low, the gravity still off and wherever they were now, it seemed like there hadn’t been a sound there since the galaxy formed.  A word from either of them would disturb this.

Besides, this wasn’t Pandora.  This wasn’t even the Pandoran system.  Or any system.  This was nothing.

“Stars move, you know,” Troy said, fumbling the silence apart.

“It’s only been like twenty years,” insisted Tyreen.  “They can’t move that fast.  We should at least be able to see it!”

He gestured a spiral with his hand.  Did she even care that the star cluster where Nekrotafeyo had grown spun opposite this one, that they were blue-shifting verses each other and that had choked the navigation system?  He decided to summarize.  “I think the computer’s a little off and umm...”

“Umm what?”

“I might have overcompensated for stellar drift since I ended up doing it manually.”

“Troy!” She made his name sound like she’d broken something.  He half-expected a slap.

“Look.” He forced calm into his voice and turned to face her as he spoke.  

She was livid, her whole body tense and her hair standing on end.  

“We can’t run out of power.  We jumped just fine.  We have water.  We have food.  We have a working toilet.”

“And where are we!”

“I’m gonna run an extrapolation and figure that out while the jump drive resets.”

“Can’t you math it in your head?”

“Um.” Sighing, Troy turned back to the view screen, focusing first on the blank reach where their ship rested, then letting his vision float to the stars.  The blackness lived between them, but in some strands there was no between, only points of light thick enough to make mist out of each other.  “I kinda don’t think so.”

Tyreen groaned and swam off towards the bed.

*

Tyreen moved better in zero g than he did.  Troy was always twisting around to his left to push, pull, founder.  Still, he hated to turn the gravity back on.  There was something about watching her float above the bed with the covers billowing around her.  She seemed so right like that, singular and and easy and in this case put out.  

Her Coeus reader was flickering lately.  She ended up groaning and setting it loose to float through the cabin where Troy caught it.

She also said— “Hey, turn the heavy back on.  I gotta piss.” 

“Alright.  On three.  Three.” Troy threw the switch.  His back crunched as weight returned to his spine through the seat at the command console.  His sister landed with a thump.  Their foodstores yelped and howled and shed feather-forms along the floor.  Tyreen caught herself with a huff and pulled herself into the water closet, giving the cage of spindly hexlings a sour look before she shut the door.  One of them shrieked after her.  Troy shushed it and went back to the console.

The keys pressed easier with weight back in his body.  He pulled up the extrapolation program.  Another likely set of coordinates failed a final round of testing and ticked away.  The system was working to match the spectrographic information of visible stars to known clusters as far as he could tell.  Color seemed such a tenuous way to determine place, but that might have been the emptiness intruding on his thoughts more than anything rational.  Besides, he kept thinking he had somehow spied the white supergiant that held Pandora out among all the other points of light.

Troy was tempted to ask his sister to try.  She was the siren.  She might be able to do it if she listened across all the dark matter between them and that place.

She was still in the water closet.  

Troy let the extrapolator run in the background and idly tabbed into the superstructure of the ship’s hard drive.  It had been made to be piloted by someone with little skill, all of the command icons in welcoming jelly style art with three to four clicks needed to access any functions more complicated than the gravity or the sublight engine speed.  He’d picked the interface up fast enough, but modifying the OS to accept a jump drive had been more hours of frustrated keystrokes than any actual handiwork.  

Every system responded in good order.  He’d done the same check once they’d cleared Nekrotafeyo’s gravity well and before the jump.  The only difference was thousands of light years to nowhere and the bottom falling out of his stomach halfway there, not more than a heartbeat.  

He even dug into the audio system.  If Tyreen asked, he wanted to be able to tell her literally everything was fine.

A handful of loose example recordings bothered the top folder.  Troy thought about moving them, but the system considered their poor placement de rigeur and complained when he tried.

Tempted to try, he clicked down the list, which was when he realized: one of them had a different date than the others.

He leaned over a speaker and hit play, curious what had been loaded on this particular sound test file.  Since that was probably it.

Instead, he heard Dad say, “Well, if it isn’t my favorite little minx.  Yeah, that’s a good girl.  Let me see those eyes shine.  I love it when you...”

He slammed stop.

There was somebody else on the file too.  They were laughing that bubbly way he knew happened, but he barely remembered as something he’d experienced in his own life.

Troy stared at the file.  He breathed again.

A thump sounded behind him and Tyreen came tripping out of the water closet, pants around her ankles and her underwear yanked up in her fist.  “What the hell was that?”

“Ah, system check.  Since we’re here, you know.”

She growled and she sat down right where she was and in the puddle of her pants.  “Warn me next time.”

“Your intuition didn’t tip you off?”

Those words didn’t even merit an answer.  She closed her eyes and turned her back to him.

The ship was so small he only would have had to lean out of the chair and he could have had his hand on her.  She wasn’t in the mood though, not about that, not about anything to do with Dad and definitely not about playing siren anytime before they made planetfall.

And well, then she wouldn’t be playing anymore, would she?

*

Maybe that fact had settled funny someplace in her stomach.  Troy just knew that after a while she stole her Coeus back and stood in the corner, smacking the screen.  The extrapolation program ticked off another hundred coordinates that didn’t suit, approaching 50% complete at a crawl.

Tyreen peered over his shoulder, but said nothing about the progress bar.

It looked like half of their chances for finding themselves had been spent.  Troy thought it was more of a best match situation.

He wondered what he would do if he was wrong.

The jump drive ticked down to usable quiescence.  Tyreen swore and started to get back into bed.  Instead she kicked her pants off and stretched out belly-down on the floor which was chalky with the bookmarks of the night they’d left.

It had only been two days.  He thought.  The active time on the sublight engine monitor was somewhat misleading.  Startup had taken so long, but he’d been fumbling all over himself, movements thick with the shock of what he was about to do.

What Tyreen said they were doing.

Like, she just… dragged him.  Now?

Now there his sister lay, looking like she’d melted into the ground.

“What’re you staring at?” she muttered without looking up from the well of her arms.

“Mm.  Nothing,” Troy murmured.  “I was thinking about when we were kids.  That game we’d play about not getting off the bed back when we only had the one and...” Well, he thought about that a lot, even though it hadn’t been bothering his mind in that moment.

Tyreen sat up, still hunched over.  Her Coeus rattled in her grasp.  Eventually, she tipped it into one of the charging slots.  “I’m eating now.  You want in?”

“Sure.”

Food was something to do anyway.  Troy hauled himself out of the chair and got himself into the cupboard after some of the stale rye bread they’d taken from the stores back at the homestead.  He checked it for mold and then also took a plum.

Tyreen picked over the cages with a tongs.  Did she want manta eggs? A hexling or two? A flush of air coral and sprat? One one of the lonesome baby Djira mewing in their own slime?

She took two eggs.  

The two of them hunched together on a sheet of tanned air algae.  Troy’s plum was sour, but he sucked the pit clean while Tyreen stared at him.  As he reached for the bread, Tyreen shoved one of the eggs at him.  “Open it for me.”

Troy sighed.  Speaking of games from when they were children— Tyreen could have eaten the egg regardless, but he’d gotten awfully good at spinning the tops off with his knife and one hand.  He smiled and he did this for her now, placing the egg on a spare sack so that his sister’s leavings would spread through the ship, get into the Instruments.  

The egg squished as she pressed her fingers inside.  It turned to dust and glass.  “Hmm.  That was fresher than I thought.”

“Good.  Want me to do the other one too?”

“Sure.”

So, he sliced again.  He was going to have to wash his hand before he finished his own super as much as the second egg leaked.

This time, his sister stared at her dirty knees.  “Are you sure you didn’t fuck everything up?”

“If I did,” Troy said softly.  “Then we’ll deal wi-...”

Tyreen sucked the other egg down, sloppy now, sand leaking between her toes.  She grabbed the piece of rye and stuck it in Troy’s mouth before burrowing into the bed and covering her head with the pillow.  

Troy chewed thoughtfully and then moved to clean up.  The baby Djira chortled in their cages as though night had fallen.  Well, it was that time by the engine clock.  

*

#bordertober #border-tober #borderlands 3 #fanfic #fanfiction #Tyreen Calypso #Tyreen being Tyreen #Troy Calypso #Troy Calypso PoV #enclosed spaces #claustrophobia #tags will change #appreciably some shade of horror #i couldn't get a straight answer on how ships are supposed to do ship things so have this #it's a hack sci-fi author blue plate special #oh and they had plums on Nekro in Grimeverse #mostly because I was hungry for plums one day

[jinxthequeergirl]

Out there (pt.2)

Crowley x Nephilim!reader

Summary: you decide to hold your intruder hostage hoping to show your father you could handle yourself but you come across a better idea.

Warning: none

I just wanna say...

The amount of love I get is in reasonable wtf?

~~~~~

You stood frozen in the Position you landed in after hitting the intruder.

"Oh fuck!"

   You dropped the book you used to hit him and knelt down beside him.

See you had a surplus of book plenty just lying around. That's how you experienced the world. So it only made sense that a nice sturdy book would have done the job. "Oh please don't be dead I can't handle a dead body right now!"

  You poked his face and whispered softly. "Hello?"

You pulled off his already half of glasses from his face. And his eyes fluttered open a little bit. "Wh-"

   He couldn't even muster a word as he began to wake up. Because as an instinct upon hearing his voice you  threw him a solid punch in the face, knocking him out again. "Damn it!.."

   You quickly got up and pulled him off the ground from behind scanning the room for a place to hide him.  You pulled him to the broom closed and stuffed him inside.

  "Stay!...stay…" you held your hand in front of him and with the other grabbed the handle and slammed the door shut.

 You presses your back against it and locket it just in case.

"I have a person in my closet…"

 You smiled softly to yourself. "I...I have a person in my closet! Haha take that dad! Can't handle myself!? Well check Out the person in my closet! Who i- oh yes ME single handedly took care of."

   You chuckled to yourself pretending to dust off your hands as you walked away from the closer door. You smiled to yourself proudly hoping that Gabriel would feel the same amount of pride you did.

  You made your way across the room to pick up your book but tripped over something. You lifted up your leg and found a bag handle wrapped around it.          

  You pulled the bag from your let and looked inside. You pulled out the single content and looked at it in awe.

  It was a small dagger. Silver from the handle to the tip. The handle was decorated with feathers and a few yellow jewels.

  You jumped when the mans phone began to ring from beside You.

  "Y/n? I have a surprise!" You quickly grabbed the phone and dagger shoved them into the bag upon hearing gabriel's voice from outside, you took the bag and  tossed it under the couch.

  "So do i!"

You ran into the sitting room just as he opened the front door. "I brought you all new books and ingredients for your favorite dinner. SURPRISE!"

  "Wow thank you! But dad." You took  the basket of gifts from him and set it down.

"I was thinking about that you said about me not being able to handle myself."

"Not this again y/n…"

"No, just listen!"

"Y/n I'VE HAD ENOUGH OF THIS WE HAVE DISCUSSED THIS!"

  You stopped And he sighed, pinching the bridge of his nose. "I was...I was just gonna ask if You could maybe get me some of those art supplies from Paris? Like when I was a kid?"

  "Really?" You nodded. "I just thought it might be better than leaving?.."

 "That might take a while...I have so much to do up stairs...it'll take a week tops till you can have it."

 He pulled you into a hug and kissed you. "But if that's what you want, I'll get it."

   "Thank you." and with that he went back up to heaven.

Once he was gone you quickly ran around the room placing your chair in the center of the room.

  You then went to the closet and opened it up. The man came tumbling out of the closet into his face.

"Ah sorry…" You lifted him up and tossed him into the chair. Which almost tipped back do to the force of you throwing him into it.

   You grabbed an old jump rope and hide from the garden shed and tied him down to the chair.  

You grabbed a lamp from across the room and shone It on him, waiting for him to wake up.

  You had your book in hand and stood back as his eyes fluttered open again. He winced in the light and looked down at his hands.

"Oh...oh no! No! No! Hallo? Where am I?"

He tried to pull his hands free but failed.

"Struggling...Struggling is pointless!"

    He looked up attempting to look out past the light into the darkness. Only then did you notice his eyes. "Demon?..." You whispered to yourself stepping closer to him.

"Is this...a jump rope?"

 You stepped into the ring of light looking at him closer. "Who are you?"

   You stared at each other for a moment. Something about you put Crowley off.

You seemed normal but there was something odd about you. The longer he looked at you the more he felt comfortable and opened his mouth to answer your name.

     "Cr-" but he stopped realising that you did after all have him tied down to a chair with jump ropes and an old garden hose he noticed. "Anthony." he lied.

   You narrowed your eyes at him telling that wasn't the truth. "Alright then ANTHONY if that is your real name...what do you want with me?"

You circled him. "Hmm? Kill me? Bring me to hell with you so you can use me?"

 "What? No I don't want anything to do with you! Except perhaps get away from you princess!"

   You stopped And raised an eyebrow. "Wait You aren't here to kidnap me?"

  "No! I just so happened to stumble upon you while running from a group of angry demons who I stole a-" he sat up straighter looking around.  "Wha...where is the bag I had? And my phone!?"

    "I've hid them where you will never find them!" You crossed your arms. He looked around and tilted his head. "It's under that sofa isn't it?" You frowned and slapped him across the face with the book.

  He woke up moments later. "Stop doing that!"

  "Now it's hidden where you will never find it. Unless…"

    He narrowed his eyes as you grabbed the lamp and spun around it. "Unless?.."

     "I've lived in this house my entire life...I need to see the world. You can have your bag back IF you take me out like a guide so to say."

    "No." the demon responded flatly.

"Something brought you here Anthony! Fate? Destiny?"

    He shrugged. "My car."

You rolled your eyes.

"Oh come on! Haven't you ever felt trapped somewhere you wanted to escape? Doing something you hate?"

    He sighed. "Well, yes but it's still a no you're trapped here for a reason why risk it."

     You slammed both hands down on his wrists and leaned in. "I'm telling you now demon! You can year this house apart but you will never find that bag! Take me into the city for just a day, return me here, and have your little bag back!"

You stared into each other's eyes.

"You've got yourself a deal princess."

     "Y/n." you corrected him.

"Sure.now let me go?"

  You carefully undid his bindings and watched him get up and cross the room to the door. He stopped only momentarily to pick up his pair of sunglasses and placed them on his face And exited the house.

   Which you took note of. You watched after him momentarily confused.

 "Coming princess?" you jumped grabbed your book and ran out the door after him. You gasped when you spotted the new gate in the stone wall.

"Wow did you do this?"

    "Yea…" as soon as you stepped out he snapped and it disappeared.

"Wow!..." You turned around and faced the trees. Which for you was something new. Sure everything was but you had spent so long climbing the wall and seeing this forest from afar and not to mention simply the top of it.

   Crowley raised an eyebrow as you stepped close to one and touched it. You dropped the book and jumped up and grabbed the lowest branch hanging from it. You let out a gleeful giggle and jumped down before running through the forest.

   Crowley sighed and picked up the book and followed you into the forest.

°

°

°

Tagging:

@writer-of-camelot

@popbubblegumpop

@jaksfanficsaver

@delightfully-anonymous

@the-hufflebird-girl

@ibjessjess

@steampowerednightvaler

@dadzawas-eyebags

@gothglamonenightstand

[xoxoendoh]

Umbra

Dreams, it occurred to her, didn't all have to be nightmares.

SasuSaku Month 2018, Day 11: Eclipse ☽

Rating: M (dark themes, language, some barely NSFW content beyond “read more”)

A/N: This is written a style that isn’t my usual and won’t be everyone’s cup of tea, but I like it for this and hope you do as well. Lastly, this is set in the pre-Shippuden time skip. 

She had willed herself to forget, begged her mind to wander, but she couldn't forget the anniversary. Not now. Not when the silvery evidence of Moonrise shone so clearly on her skin... 

Her body went rigid. The pain was coming back, thoughts of him were coming back. It had been exactly twenty-nine days since her Lunatic dream had last invaded her mind. Since he had invaded her mind. Since she had allowed herself to think of him, ...to feel anything at all. 

She decided it was the Moon causing her insane dreams—that was it. That had to be it. Seeing the Full Moon simply reminded her of him....

Because he was the Moon.

Solid.

Strong.

Pale.

Devastatingly beautiful.

Untouchable.

Unreachable.

Encased only by a halo of darkness.

Covered in craters, wounds of the past.

Never to be fully healed.

Only to be further mottled and marred.

Surrounded by bright lights longing to illuminate his constant Umbra.

But unable to touch those radiant stars.

…

…

…

He was the Moon, but so was she.

…

…

…

Her fingers reflexively curled inward, nails poised to cut crimson Crescents into her palms, but she caught herself and flung them out in a quaking fan.

No.

She wouldn’t resort to that. She’d sworn after his last apparition that she wouldn’t allow him to interfere. Not again (not even in her nightmares). And she had prepared for this, after all: she had acquired a silver bullet to keep the Moon at bay. She emptied the contents of a small bottle in her trembling hand, weighing (medically, scientifically, practically…) how many it would take to knock her out cold, to wave away any chances of dreams….

—

She felt him there; she didn't sense the proximity of his chakra—no! She felt his body on hers, his lips on hers, his fingers twining with hers. 

She slowly unlidded her dazed, anesthetized eyes. 

He withdrew (for just a moment) to give her a handsome smirk, and she was dazzled. The charcoal depths of his eyes, the way his pale face reflected the Moonlight—was the Moonlight.... It wasn't fair how beautiful he was, it wasn't fair for any one man to be able to incite such lust in her! It wasn't fair that she should hate him for all the pain he caused her…yet all she could do was love him in that moment.

A sure hand slid up her bare thigh and under the loose, white shirt in which she slept, gliding over her cool stomach with born grace. His air-soft lips gently skimmed over her neck, constricting her breathing with the touch of a feather. She cried out softly and tilted her head back, begging for more of his awakening touch, begging to feel something again.

Years and months and weeks and days and hours and minutes and seconds of pain and the agony of nothing had worn her.... So she succumbed. 

To her fear, her anger, her guilt, her lust, her love. 

She let the waves of emotions roll over her, yet she didn't drown as she had expected. She stayed gently afloat, hovering placidly above rage and hate and fright and blame. She would give to him whatever he asked, so long as he continued to bring life back into her veins. 

A dream. Can I only feel alive in a dream…?

The thought didn't quite hit her, just drifted serenely above her head, and she didn't care anymore. She just wanted to feel life again, and his hot touches seared her with sensation. His knuckles flowed leisurely over her neck as he charily held himself above her petite frame, cognizant of his mass. His lips caressed hers so chastely, so delicately, they wouldn't have broken the thinnest thread of silk, left a spider's web unmarred. 

He was far gentler than she remembered…but he was in her dreams, after all.

She kissed him back, but so tentatively, so faintly, for she thought the slightest movement would wake her into her nightmarish reality, would dispel her Moonlit dreamland. Her lips made another contact with his, and she couldn't help but deeply inhale his scent, a breath of life. 

Dreams, it occurred to her, didn't all have to be nightmares (or so she desperately hoped).

She carefully wrapped an alabaster arm around his neck and brought him down on her, threading her fingers through his dark hair. She tightened her grip on the hand around hers. For just a moment, she resisted allowing their mouths to collide, but she disregarded whatever thought had stopped her and let their bodies meld, his long hair dusting her forehead and cheeks.

She hadn't been touched in so long, let alone kissed (ever). But it felt so perfect, and she knew she had to be dreaming (but she didn't quite notice). He felt so natural, so masterful above her. She let him guide her lips with his until she found a soft, delicate rhythm to follow. She felt his tongue deftly flick across her bottom lip, and she parted for him with a low keen, reveling in the heat of his body, his mouth. She traced her dainty fingers over her love's strong shoulders, imprinting her hallucination into her mind as well as she could. He was taking everything so slowly, being so careful with her, savoring every second. 

It was (ironically) everything she had ever dreamed of.

He stroked her tongue with his as he put his weight on an elbow. He tenderly held her face, unhurriedly running his thumb over her cheek bone, as if checking for evidence of tears. He pulled away just long enough for both of them to catch a quick breath, to see the longing in the other’s eyes, and then descended on her body again. She felt whole with his body pressed so closely to hers: so warm in his arms, so at home in her own house for the first time in years.

Home is wherever he is, she realized.

He caught her bottom lip between his teeth, tugging gently, and he stole the moan from her throat. Pleasure undulated through her limbs before settling in her stomach, coiling and unfurling. She became more confident in her explorations of his mouth and traced his lips with curiosity and wonder, gliding over his tongue with hers. His groan resonated through his chest into hers. She felt that deep sound everywhere and pulled him closer.

She loved being kissed. She loved being held. She loved being caressed. She loved feeling another heartbeat on her. She loved simply being touched. She loved loving him.

And she just fucking loved feeling alive for the first time in so long.

And then came the grief—it had finally sunk it. A dream—it was another dream. She knew such pure elation, joy, happiness, ecstasy would soon end. The tears came shortly after her realization that she was dreaming, dreaming the bliss she felt!

And she kissed him fiercely.

Do you see what you do to me?! she thought. Do you know?!

Hoping enough heat could vaporize the tears, she arched her body into his, sucking on his tongue, digging her nails into his scalp. 

She would take what he could fucking give her.

But he bit down on her lip in admonition, and a low growl rumbled from his throat as he retreated from her embrace.

Why…?

Crestfallen, deflated, she surrendered to him (as she always had) and allowed him to break their link. He lowered his cheek to her shoulder, panting on her neck as he kissed down the length of it. Yet she was nearly sobbing: his rejection was a vacuum. She didn’t notice when he rolled off her and pulled her back into his chest. Limp and inanimate, she clung to what she could see, to what she knew was real: a teardrop, pearlescent in the Moonbeams, sliding toward the white cliff of her nose. When his mouth leisurely roamed across her shoulder and bare arm, she couldn’t feel it. 

But when he wrapped an arm around her waist to enfold her utterly, drawing her small body flush against his... 

He had refused to leave his genteel ways for passion…yet she could feel the hard manifestation of his desire pressing cotton into her skin. In an instant, her tears ran dry and she turned in his arms to face him. 

If this is a dream…why can’t it be a fantasy? 

She placed butterfly kisses down his neck, sliding lower and lower down her sheets, further and further out of his arms, until she reached the white divide of his yukata.

"Make me feel alive," she whispered on him as she spread the material to shed more Moonlight on his skin.

He strained under her lips as she traversed the hard ridges of his abdomen, as her trailing fingers delighted in the incalescence of his body. He stiffened as her mouth touched the hollow of his hipbone. But when she began her aching descent of the sinewy V she found there, he went rigid. 

The fever in her froze, and she looked up to him. His face was serene perfection, but his eyes betrayed him. He closed them, almost painfully, and slowly oscillated his head. Before she could object, his arms had reclaimed her. 

Why? This is my dream, so why can’t I...?

Then he kissed her forehead and nestled her into the crook of his neck. She could feel his breath on her ear, the steady drumming of his heart, the stroke of his fingers—lulling and soothing. And she couldn’t fight it. No matter how much she knew she should be angry or miserable or lustful or heartbroken or guilt-ridden, she closed her eyes in complete tranquility: he was there, she could feel him there, and he wanted her too.

But she opened them a moment later, and he was gone.

In his place was the blinding sun.

Hope you enjoyed it. :) Just getting back into writing creatively again, and I still feel so rusty—feedback is always appreciated! 

I made this a stand-alone, but it comes from my fic “He Was the Moon.” ☽ If you’re interested in more, you can read it on FF.net, along with some of my other SasuSaku and ItaSaku fics (which are not written in the craaazy-dramatic diction I use in “HWM”). Be advised: "He Was the Moon” is dark and does get very NSFW.

Anyways, thank you to the SasuSaku Month organizers and everyone who’s participated—love seeing all the SasuSaku in my dash!

My other SSM18 submissions:

☀ No content warning:

Gravitation, Day 2: Side by Side |  Close to Lost, Day 4: Burn

☾ NSFW: The Cherry Wood Armoire, Day 31: Free

#ssm18d11 #ssm18 #sasusaku #dark sasusaku #fanfic #fanfiction #sasusaku fanfic #endohwrites #sasuke #sakura #dark

[mauserfrau]

Eyeshine 1&2 - Bordertober

Reposting 1 since I changed the one line that gets repeated.  Ooof.  This thing might be quite a few parts! Not complaining.  Def. expect a spit-polished version on Ao3 eventually.

Anyway, last verse same as the first: Twins on the ship, something fishy is going on, Tyreen’s being Tyreen.  Hecking claustrophobia.

The jump brought them to a space so empty it didn’t even seem black.  No— darkness rested between other stars, far off and distant.  Here was a clear nothingness, out of reach of the rest of the universe.  

Tyreen drifted at his shoulder.  He could feel her fuming.

Neither of them had said anything sound since they’d stopped.  The lights were low, the gravity still off and wherever they were now, it seemed like there hadn’t been a sound there since the galaxy formed.  A word from either of them would disturb this.

Besides, this wasn’t Pandora.  This wasn’t even the Pandoran system.  Or any system.  This was nothing.

“Stars move, you know,” Troy said, fumbling the silence apart.

“It’s only been like twenty years,” insisted Tyreen.  “They can’t move that fast.  We should at least be able to see it!”

He gestured a spiral with his hand.  Did she care that the star cluster where Nekrotafeyo had grown spun opposite this one, that they were blue-shifting verses each other and that had choked the navigation system? He decided to summarize.  “I think the computer’s a little off and umm…”

“Umm what?”

“I might have overcompensated for stellar drift since I ended up doing it manually.”

“Troy!” She made his name sound like she’d broken something.  He half-expected a slap.

“Look.” He forced calm into his voice and turned to face her as he spoke.  

She was livid, her whole body tense and her hair standing on end.  

“We can’t run out of power.  We jumped fine.  We have water.  We have food.  We have a working toilet.”

“And where are we!”

“I’m gonna run an extrapolation and figure that out while the jump drive resets.”

“Can’t you math it in your head?”

“Um.” Sighing, Troy turned back to the view screen, focusing first on the blank reach where their ship rested, then letting his vision float to the stars.  The blackness lived between them, but in some strands there was no between, only stars thick enough to make mist out of each other.  “I don’t think so.”

Tyreen groaned and swam off towards the bed.

*

Tyreen moved better in zero g than he did.  Troy was always twisting around to his left to push, pull, founder.  Still, he hated to turn the gravity back on.  There was something about watching her float above the bed with the covers billowing around her.  She seemed so right like that, singular and and easy and in this case put out.  

Her Coeus reader was flickering lately.  She ended up groaning and setting it loose to float through the cabin where Troy caught it.

She also said— “Hey, turn the heavy back on.  I gotta piss.” 

“Alright.  On three.  Three.” Troy threw the switch.  His back crunched as weight returned to his spine through the seat at the command console.  His sister landed with a thump.  Their foodstores yelped and howled and shed feather-forms along the floor.  Tyreen caught herself with a huff and pulled herself into the water closet, giving the cage of spindly hexlings a sour look before she shut the door.  One of them shrieked after her.  Troy shushed it and went back to the console.

The keys pressed easier with weight back in his body.  He pulled up the extrapolation program.  Another likely set of coordinates failed a final round of testing and ticked away.  The system was working to match the spectrographic information of visible stars to known clusters as far as he could tell.  Color seemed such a tenuous way to determine place, but that might have been the emptiness intruding on his thoughts more than anything rational.  Besides, he kept thinking he had somehow spied the white supergiant that held Pandora out among all the other points of light.

Troy was tempted to ask his sister to try.  She was the Siren.  She might be able to do it if she listened across all the dark matter between them and that place.

She was still in the water closet.  

Troy let the extrapolator run in the background and idly tabbed into the superstructure of the ship’s hard drive.  It had been made to be piloted by someone with little skill, all of the command icons in welcoming jelly-style art with three to four clicks needed to access any functions more complicated than the gravity or the sublight engine speed.  He’d picked the interface up fast enough, but modifying the OS to accept a jump drive had been more hours of frustrated keystrokes than any actual handiwork.  

Every system responded in good order.  He’d done the same check once they’d cleared Nekrotafeyo’s gravity well and before the jump.  The only difference was thousands of light years to nowhere and the bottom falling out of his very existence for a heartbeat.  

He even dug into the audio system.  If Tyreen asked, he wanted to be able to tell her literally everything was fine.

A handful of loose example recordings bothered the top folder.  Troy thought about moving them, but the system considered their poor placement somehow proper and complained when he tried.

Tempted again, he clicked down the list, which was when he realized: one of them had a different date than the others.

He leaned over a speaker and hit play, curious what had been loaded on this particular sound test file.  Since that was probably it.

Instead, he heard Dad say, “Well, if this isn’t some sweet doll over here..  Yeah, that’s a good girl.  Let me see those eyes shine.  I love it when you…”

He slammed stop.

There was somebody else on the file too.  They were laughing that bubbly way he knew happened, but he barely remembered as something he’d experienced in his own life.

Troy stared at the file.  

A thump sounded behind him and Tyreen came tripping out of the water closet, pants around her ankles and her underwear yanked up in her fist.  “What the hell was that?”

“Ah, system check.  Since we’re here, you know.”

She growled and she sat down right where she was and in the puddle of her pants.  “Warn me next time.”

“Your intuition didn’t tip you off?”

Those words didn’t even merit an answer.  She closed her eyes and turned her back to him.

The ship was so small he only would have had to lean out of the chair and he could have had his hand on her.  She wasn’t in the mood though, not about that, not about anything to do with Dad and definitely not about playing Siren anytime before they made planetfall.

And well, then she wouldn’t be playing anymore, would she?

*

Maybe that fact had settled funny someplace in her stomach.  Troy just knew that after a while she stole her Coeus back and stood in the corner, smacking the screen.  The extrapolation program ticked off another hundred coordinates that didn’t suit, approaching 50% complete at a crawl.

Tyreen peered over his shoulder, but said nothing about the progress bar.

It looked like half of their chances for finding themselves had been spent.  Troy thought it was more of a best match situation.

He wondered what he would do if he was wrong.

The jump drive reported usable quiescence.  Tyreen swore and started to get back into bed.  Instead she kicked her pants off and stretched out belly-down on the floor which was chalky with the bookmarks of the night they’d left.

It had only been two days.  He thought.  The active time on the sublight engine monitor was somewhat misleading.  Startup had taken so long, but he’d been fumbling all over himself, movements thick with the shock of what he was about to do.

What Tyreen said they were doing.

Like, she just… dragged him.  Now?

Now there his sister lay, looking like she’d melted into the ground.

“What’re you staring at?” she muttered without looking up from the well of her arms.

“Mm.  Nothing,” Troy murmured.  “I was thinking about when we were kids.  That game we’d play about not getting off the bed back when we only had the one.” Well, he thought about that a lot, even though it hadn’t been bothering his mind in that moment.

Tyreen sat up, still hunched over.  Her Coeus rattled in her grasp.  Eventually, she tipped it into one of the charging slots.  “I’m eating now.  You want in?”

“Sure.”

Food was something to do anyway.  Troy hauled himself out of the chair and got himself into the cupboard after some of the stale rye bread they’d taken from the stores back at the homestead.  He checked it for mold and then also took a plum.

Tyreen picked over the cages with a tongs.  Did she want manta eggs? A hexling or two? A flush of air coral and sprat? One one of the lonesome baby Djira mewing in their own slime?

She took two eggs.  

The two of them hunched together on a sheet of tanned air algae.  Troy’s plum was sour, but he sucked the pit clean while Tyreen stared at him.  As he reached for the bread, Tyreen shoved one of the eggs at him.  “Open it for me.”

Troy sighed.  Speaking of games from when they were children, Tyreen could have eaten the egg regardless, but he’d gotten awfully good at spinning the tops off with his knife and one hand.  He smiled and he did this for her now, placing the egg on a spare sack so that his sister’s leavings would spread through the ship, get into the instruments.  

The egg squished as she pressed her fingers inside.  It turned to dust and glass.  “Hmm.  That was fresher than I thought.”

“Good.  Want me to do the other one too?”

“Sure.”

So, he sliced again.  He was going to have to wash his hand before he finished his own super.

This time, his sister stared at her dirty knees.  “Are you sure you didn’t fuck everything up?”

“If I did,” Troy said softly, “then we’ll deal wi-…”

Tyreen leeched the other egg, sloppily this time, sand leaking between her toes.  She grabbed the piece of rye and stuck it in Troy’s mouth before burrowing into the bed and covering her head with the pillow.  

Troy chewed thoughtfully and then moved to clean up.  The baby Djira chortled in their cages as though night had fallen.  Well, it was that time by the engine clock.  

*

Tyreen sat in the bed.  She left her Coeus in the charging station and kept scratching her ankles.  Suddenly, she tugged her socks off, tossed them aside and toppled over and over the blanket until she ended up beneath it.  She turned the lights down and resumed watching the space above her.

“Hey, Troy?” she said.  

“Hey yeah,” he answered, turning in the seat for the navigation console.  The old bearings hissed.  

“Who decided which way the ceiling goes in these things?”

That didn’t sound like a her question.  It held too much potential to wander.  It also did, echoing in him as he considered if she wanted an answer or not.  In a way too, it made sense.  Space brought no horizon for her to navigate, no right side of a Marrow Bone to climb.  “Well, that’s the same place the ceiling went wherever it was built.  There’s no up out here.”

“Right, right.”

“No North either.”

“So we can’t get to Pandora upside down?” she asked that last part in a slow, measured voice.  

“We actually cannot do that.  But we are…” Troy pointed towards the viewscreen.  “…somersaulting real slow that way if you see the stars changing at the edges of the viewscreen.  It’s just with the gravity on we…”

“OK, OK.  I get it.  I’m going to sleep now.” She turned over, back to him, clenching the covers.  “Saving my excitement for later or whatever.”

He could tell she was still hungry, the way she bundled up.  Troy didn’t mention it though.   Instead, he said, “Excitement shouldn’t be much longer.”

There was no answer.  

*

Troy listened for his sister’s breathing to even out and to the abandoned place kind of quiet in the shuttle.  The water and oxygen cycler ran every fifteen minutes, bubbling at the end.  The fans for the computer equipment hummed in a way that reminded him of the ruins back on Nekrotafeyo.  Their Djira murmured at one another through the dried scrub that made up their cages and the faint chemical reek of their drained acid.

And the sounds of her sleeping.  That too.  

Little by little, he swung towards his pack, slipping his fingers inside and feeling around until his touch glanced a familiar cord.

The headphones were older than him, their audio tinny and erratic given the air algae patches on the wires.  

Troy held one pad to his ear.  The jack filled with static as he tabbed back to the errant audio file.  He set the volume down low and pressed play.

The speaker rang to life.  There was music— synth and beats and wind instruments.  Some other sound too, water or distant conversation.  

Then, Dad’s voice.  “Well, if this isn’t some sweet doll over here.  Yeah, that’s a good girl.  Let me see those eyes shine.  I love it when you act all shy.  No, wait, wait, wait…” a swish of movement followed, besides the strains of laughter.  Typhon.  And a woman.  “…there’s some fancy word for that.”

“Coy? Coquettish?” Fuck, her voice was light as sunshine, ephemeral and gone someplace in the worn-out headphones.  “Well, Mr. DeLeon, what’s the big idea? I followed you back to your little ship.”

“No, no.  It’s a boat.  Ships are big.  Got names.”

“So I must be anything but shy.  Riiight?”

“You know I put the recorder on.”

“Oooh.  That’s different.”

There was a kiss.

Troy swallowed.  He shut the playback off and pulled the headphones out of the jack.

He breathed like he’d been down to the bottom of a crater lake long enough to make his ears throb.

He breathed and breathed until the cycler ran and Tyreen snuffled in her sleep.

The location program still hadn’t produced a result.  It seemed to be running slower again.  Feeling over the housing for the processor, he didn’t think it felt any warmer than the rest of the shuttle, so it wouldn’t be a mechanical issue.  Hopefully.  

Troy stood and stretched.  He tried to wash his face in the water closet, but that got him cold.  In the end, he went over to the bed, still damp, and he pressed himself into the smallest place beside his sister that he could manage.

The thing was damned uncomfortable, lumpy and musty and too short for him.  Besides, he had no way to match the fold of his knees to Tyreen’s.  What little space he did find wasn’t a comfortable one.

He rubbed at his eyes one more time, tracking water off from his lashes.  In the brief moment before his eyes focused he saw his father, a shadow of a woman draped elegantly beside him as they each breathed wine on the microphone.

He also saw himself, curled up below the bed, arm wrapped protectively around his head.

That looked even less comfortable than he felt.

Besides, he was too tired to move.

*

Tyreen chased him out of the way so she could head to the water closet.  One of the hexlings chittered at her as she passed and she flipped it off.  She stayed in, swearing for awhile, as Troy pressed himself to the wall side.  He left her the blanket and squeezed his toes between the mattress and the wall.  

He almost slept again before the toilet flushed and she returned.  She ground herself to his back, so close he could taste her breath when she sleep-sighed.  Well, he got some blanket too this way.

Troy thought he heard her scuffling off of the bed right before he drifted off again, but it must have been the shuttle itself again since his last awareness was of her nearness making his back twinge.

They got up together what would have been shortly before dawn by their clock.  Troy ate a slice of bread and Tyreen the leaking Djira.  She swung around to the consoles with one of its clipped claws dangling between her fingers.  “Yeah, that one was no good for you.  This didn’t poof.  Musta been dead.”

“Sure didn’t,” said Troy.  “Look what I’ve got.”

Tyreen looked from a space bent over his lap.  A pleased snicker flowed from her.  She pointed to a globule of brightness wedged in the very corner of the viewscreen.  “Pandora’s that way! Yes!”

Recalling what his fancy from earlier, that maybe she could spy their destination between all of the emptiness, Troy laughed too.  There were other stars in the way and lagging behind, but she looked pretty much right to him based on the jump display.  “Pandora’s where we’ll be in like ten minutes.  Just gotta get us cued up.” He made a show of gliding his hand up the charge slider for the jump drive console.  “Well, and then a day or two while we pull into the system and land.  I’m not gonna take us in super close because of…”

“Yeah, yeah.  We’re almost there!”

“We’re almost there!” 

The parameters for landing the jump hadn’t saved.  He muttered to himself as he slid them back in.  He wanted the shuttle to appear this many AUs from the planet, LaGrange points to be avoided in case of debris or sudden space stations.  Time was as soon as possible.  Gravity…

As Tyreen fiddled with her Coeus, he announced, “Heavy off on three.  Three!”

And his sister, reader in hand, pushed up on her toes, floating towards the ceiling as her supper squealed and the fan in the water closet took up some stray water droplets.  

This was a much smaller jump than the last one.  It took, well, closer to twenty minutes for the system to finish processing exactly how to suck them through spacetime.  

The chime sounded.  Troy hovered his hand over the execute button, wiggling an eyebrow at his sister and daring her to push it first.  She lunged.  He slammed his fist down.  She pulled his hair as he laughed again.

And then nothing.

Unknown Error said the jump drive console.  Nothing else changed.  There wasn’t even a chime from the audio system.  

*

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