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theidiotwhowritesthings · 8 months

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Hi JJ! 💕 These are such great questions, I can’t wait to see your answers! Could I please ask these?

F: Share a snippet from one of your favourite dialogue scenes you've written and explain why you're proud of it.

M: Got any premises on the back burner that you'd care to share?

Hello, my love! Omg thank you for the questions! I think 'F' is my favorite one to answer, but it also takes me the longest b/c I am bad at trying to pick just one out lolol

I'll do M first since it's shorter.

M: Got any premises on the back burner that you'd care to share?

So, I hinted at it with my poll, but for October I kind of want to do a Joel Miller x Reader x Din Djarin supernatural special! The basic outline is Reader is working for an agency, like the FBI, that specializes in supernatural creatures and keeping their existence hidden from the rest of the world. She's a desk agent dreaming of becoming a field agent. Initially, I was thinking Agent!Joel Miller who got started in the line of work when his daughter Sarah was killed by supernatural creatures and Greek God!Din Djarin (I don't want to go into details of what I planned to do with them just in case I go back to this idea). BUT THAT BEING SAID, your incredible story 'Bleed For Me' absolutely reminded me that I'm feral for vampires🥴 so then I started thinking, 'okay, what about Werewolf!Joel and Vampire!Din, and Agent!Reader gets caught in the crossfires of a war??'

My goal is to have the mini story be a 'choose your own end' where Reader can either end up with one or the other. But to everyone reading this right now, lemme know what you think!! I love opinions b/c I never trust my own lol (also if you haven't read @saradika 's story I need you to stop everything and go do that now k, thx)

F: Share a snippet from one of your favorite dialogue scenes you've written and explain why you're proud of it.

This one might be more recognizable! It's from 'A Fresh Start'. It's from the chapter where Din finds out about Reader's past and the guilt she has over not being able to save her best friend. I love it b/c I accidentally wrote a banger of a line at the end there. But more so b/c I think one thing we as humans struggle with is letting go of guilt. Even if it's guilt that we shouldn't necessarily be carrying our brains will just cling to it and refuse to let it go, and no matter how many people tell us 'it's okay' we just can't shake it. Sometimes we just need a person we love to reframe the guilt in our minds to be something easier to process. Din does that for Reader in this scene, and I just loved writing it.

You couldn’t help but chuckle at the comment, but it was short lived. You gave a small shrug. “She crashed. Soran couldn’t breathe. There was no other reason for it so I knew it had to be a clot. I had hoped it was a blood clot. I could fix that.” You pressed your lips together. Eyes focusing on the edge of his helmet⏤ unable to meet the eyes you couldn’t even see. “Started a blood thinner to break apart the clot, but it didn’t help. That’s when I knew… the blockage wasn’t a blood clot. It was a fat globule.”

“What are you supposed to do for that?”

“There’s nothing you can do. Not at that point.” You answered. “We don’t have a medicine to break up a fat embolism quickly. The moment it got lodged in her lungs like that…”

Din nodded. “How do you prevent that from happening after a trauma? Is there a medicine for that?”

“Well, no, you⏤ Din, what are you doing?”

“I’m trying to understand.” He replied. “The court transcripts had a few different testimonies. They all had a common agreement. Every doctor interviewed said Soran was dead the moment that building landed on her.”

You shook your head and tried to pull your hand away, but Din’s grip tightened. He wouldn’t let you go. “She was my best friend. I knew her since we were kids. We grew up together⏤ we were neighbors. I shouldn’t have been her doctor.”

“You were the only one available at the time. You tried to find someone, but there was no one else.” Din replied. “If you hadn’t jumped in, then she would’ve died even sooner.” He leaned forward. “The starship collision caused the building she worked in to collapse. Soran got trapped in the rubble. A pillar fractured her femur and shattered her pelvis.” The way he spoke was as if he had memorized the transcript itself. “Soran was trapped for eight hours before she was un-buried and brought to your ED. A pulmonary fat embolism, something you said that can’t be prevented or treated, can form six hours after even a single fracture.”

Your bottom lip quivered and you bit down on it in a poor attempt to control your emotions. These were all facts you knew. Logically, you understood everything, but there was a part of you that could not shake the guilt that planted roots in your heart. The entire trial you had sat in a haze. You barely remembered the specifics of those days. In fact, only one memory stuck with you⏤ the hatred and rage in Kurt’s eyes as he stared at you from the court gallery.

“There’s nothing you can say that I haven’t heard before, Din.” You mumbled.

“I know. I’m sure.” Din nodded once. “But that doesn’t mean I’m not going to say it.” He rested his forehead against yours. “Ner kar’ta, you did not kill your best friend.” The unshed tears collecting in your eyes spilled over. “Soran did not die by your hands. You were just the last hands to care for her⏤ the last hands to show her love.”

#ask game #sometimes when i write #i'm accidentally insightful

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jadeleechsupportgroup · 6 months

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personal happenings and thoughts below the jump. cw talk of medical stuff, death, cancer, mental illness, bipolar, idk, a shit ton.

my dad is dying. he got diagnosed with metastatic liver cancer in may, a week after he turned 70. he got immunotherapy treatments all summer. it shrunk the tumor but also destroyed the rest of his body because he was already just so sick in general. about 3 (4?) weeks ago, they found blood clots in his lungs and an especially large one in his leg. they suggested discontinuing treatment and moving him into hospice care.

i inherited my food allergies and bipolar disorder from him. and i'm trying to use that as a turning point in my own life - doing my best to avoid those foods (gluten non-negotiable, dairy just a bad idea), going to therapy (including IOP), staying on medication, etc. all the good shit.

but it has been so hard watching him die.

He tells my mom how no matter when he sleeps, he has nightmares. Whenever I go back home (out of state) to help, I see the manic and depressive episodes hit fast and hard. I feel like I'm witnessing the brain damage in action, and I feel like I'm watching whatever will happen to me if I make it to that age. I also never sleep like a normal person and have horrible dreams. without the meds I hear background noise in my brain, which I only learned more recently is a form of psychosis.

it's easy to look back and either be angry or sad about how i never got this kind of help as a kid or teen. I had symptoms in early grade school. but it was the 90s (1900s am I right haha) so I doubt there was anywhere my parents could have even taken me for treatment.

I'm trying to just...feel my feelings as they come. Practicing the things I learned in group because they mostly make it manageable. blogging here, i guess. learning not to ruminate too hard on this or the other things in my life which are shit, which idk if i'll ever have the strength to blog about, but maybe someday.

my dad and i have had a more difficult relationship since the you-know-what in 2016. living at home because i could afford nothing else, and coming to the realization that i was non-binary in addition to ace, suddenly became a hellscape with him spewing bigotry so openly. when it gets right down to it, i'm sure he wouldn't have thrown me out on the street. which i know is the bare minimum. it's complicated. but I also know he loves me. I can tell lately he's been thinking back on his life and the mistakes/choices he made. it doesn't make it okay but it's.......something.

I don't know. I spend my days waiting for the crushing sadness to punch me in the chest. It hasn't yet. But it's dark all the time now and it's cold as shit and the holidays are the worst part of the year for me because so many bad anniversaries are coming up. I'm in a place I've only lived for a couple years and I don't really have any friends outside of work (which is, of course, two jobs, because capitalism is a plague).

I know things will happen. Some good things, some bad things, some things with no emotional points awarded. knowing it's gonna hurt is not doing me any favors. but I have to get this out somehow so here it is.

and now for some pics that cheer me up.

my dad and I are both pilots, so this one is cute.

I won an iguana at the carnival as a kid. He lived an extremely spoiled life. And got very long.

and, of course, the wiggly pig (one of amelia's numerous names)

thanks for reading if you've made it this far, or even if you didn't.

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nightinghoul · 2 years

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Pinky

CW: Pet Death, descriptions of painful pet illness and death

On Saying Good-Bye

My Pinky passed away from a sudden illness two days ago, and my heart is broken. She picked up a stomach bug that I guess would have been just an annoyance for a larger dog, but Pinky was four pounds. She had never been sick before, not as long as we’d had her, anyway.

Day one, she was throwing up and didn’t feel like eating, but she was walking around and seemed to be improving by the hour. My spouse and I have a lot of animal, and especially dog, experience. We knew that if we called the vet, they would say to keep her hydrated and bring her in if she threw up more, became lethargic, or if her respiration rate changed. That night, she was acting very lethargic, and we decided we needed to take her to the vet in the morning. I gave her some water, and put her by the bed to sleep (I was afraid if I put her in the bed, I’d roll over on her, or knock her off).

In the middle of the night, because I don't sleep well as a rule, I woke up and checked on her. She was not responding. Normally, she would growl and snap if anyone touched her, but she was just lying there. I tried to give her some water, but she was having trouble lifting her head to drink. I picked her up, and she had a seizure.

We drove to the 24 hour emergency vet, and they were closed. The 24 hour emergency vet is CLOSED on Wednesday mornings (12 - 10 AM). We called the one other 24 hour emergency vet. They were also closed for Wednesday morning. We didn't get the memo about not having pet emergencies on Wednesday mornings.

Now we were into Day 2. We waited for the vet to open at 7AM. When I walked in, they took her to the back immediately. By that point, she was totally unresponsive except for an occasional haunting wail like I’ve never heard a dog make in my life (and I worked in animal care for years.) They gave her pain meds and sedatives.

She had pancreatitis, which never has a very good prognosis (although I’ve heard of one case of a friend’s dog pulling through.) By noon, she was throwing brain clots, and having multiple strokes and seizures. Our vet is a darling, wonderful, hopeful person, and just kept coming up with the best case scenario. If we did this and this and this, maybe we could get her to the point where she would live a bit longer, but she would still have blood clots. As long as we got her to an emergency vet every time she had a blood clot related stroke, maybe they could save her (as long as it wasn’t a Wednesday morning.)

We didn’t talk about it for long. She was being tortured for a very slim chance to live a short, miserable life. It was time to let go.

I sleep a lot during the day, because I don't sleep well at night. I wake up a lot, whether I napped during the day or not. I've been like this a long time. Anyway, I have a lot of broken sleep throughout the day and night. So, right now, every time I wake up, the loss of our little dog hits me all over again. I go through a half-dream bargaining sequence. I realize death is permanent, and curse under my breath.

Pinky was a terrible dog. I refuse to let fading memory convince me that she wasn't just awful, because that was part of her appeal. She had the worst temper of any dog I've ever met.

I guess when I say awful, I mean difficult. She was also wonderful. I think she really wished she could snuggle and be sweet without getting angry. The fact that she was always working through that made me love her more, because I feel like she was trying really hard.

Like, when she would get upset, and I would say "Go to your growly bed!" She had a specific bed that she would go to and growl and be angry. Sometimes she would go there without anyone telling her, and if she was there, we knew not to bother her. The first year, I questioned our decision to keep her, time and time again. She bit me so hard with those sharp little razor teeth, so many times. She made me look so bad in front of strangers, but friends who got to spend time with her completely understood: she was complicated.

The house is so quiet without her. She was the main instigator of pandemonium in our household. Mealtimes, dogs barking down the street, doorbells - These things required thunderous acknowledgement. And, good lord, was she loud. The only thing louder than her bark now is her absence. I wish she had had a chance to fully heal from whatever it was that made her so angry. I wish she had gotten to live a normal lifespan. I wish didn't have to say goodbye all over again every time I open my eyes. You can spend a life-time loving and losing this way, and never get used to it.

I wrote a poem about her last year, so I'm going to share it here. Please don't judge my free verse!

https://poetizer.com/poem/2640600

#pet death #goodbye #i love my dogs #rainbow bridge

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theevilmaninyourcomputer · 11 months

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For the past few weeks I've felt like I've been in some kind of mental decline. Stringing thoughts together takes way too much effort, and I feel weak and faint when I stand for an extended amount of time. Also, my head has hurt constantly. I mean, I've had a headache for three weeks (I have chronic migraines so this isn't that unusual). I came to the conclusion that I was just extremely burnt out, and coming down off of final exam stress. But I'm a hypochondriac, so I secretly began to assume the worst. Maybe I have a blood clot in my brain, or I've spontaneously developed early onset alzheimer's or childhood dementia! I actually cried about this to my mom yesterday and she was like, "I'm not taking you to the ER for 'brain fog'" which is honestly reasonable. So, because I am incapabale of being normal about anything, I started doing research and I realized: I am so fucking dehydrated. Like, ridiculously dehydrated. There have been multiple days in the last month where my daily water intake has been one or two cups of coffee. And fun story, my sister absolutely despises the flavor of water. So much so that she has developed an irregular heartbeat, is randomly overcome with vertigo, and has done irreparable damage to her vital organs. It's bad. She's probably going to have to go on IV fluids in the near future. Anyway, I asked her how much water she actually drank, and she was like "I don't know, two, three cups a day?" Well, shit? If she's experiencing these symptoms and drinking more water than me, then what the hell am I doing? So long story short, I probably don't have a serious medical issue. I just need to drink water. Hopefully.

Still, it's freaking me out. I keep forgetting words, like, really basic words. Or accidentally substituting words for other words. And if I focus too hard on the spelling of a word, or the grammatical structure of a sentence, the words lose meaning. When I referenced my hypochondria, I wasn't exaggerating. I legitimately do have hypochondria. So since I've noticed this, I've been in a state of constant panic. I'm used to my head being a place I can retreat into. But lately, I haven't felt compelled to invent elaborate daydream worlds or internally monologue for hours. And to combat this, I find myself straining, forcing myself to do so anyway. I miss the comfortable chaos that used to be my mind. It's too still, too stagnant. It's disconcertingly silent. I feel like something is legitimately wrong with me and I'm fucking scared. But at the same time, I recognize the possibility that I am making a mountain out of a molehill.

My anxiety always worsens during the summer. I wouldn't consider myself an extrovert (far from it), however I do need some level of human contact or I lose my fucking mind.

But still, what if this is just how my life is now? What if I'm just not smart anymore? My entire life, I've been told that my writing is what's going to get me into college. If I can't form a coherent thought, or write a sentence without second guessing myself, how the hell am I going to get anywhere in life? If I lose the ability to create, then I am nothing.

This is besides the point, but I've already made the decision not to pursue a career in writing. I think I would enjoy journalism, or screenwriting (just, something creatively challenging), but with the recent developments in AI, I don't think that dream is feasible anymore.

I'm trying not to spiral, but thinking gives me a headache. An actual, physical headache. That's not fucking normal. What the hell is wrong with me??

Anyway this blog is like, my journal now. I know that no one will really see (or read) these, and word vomiting into the void makes me feel better. It's like, the potential of someone stumbling across it and connecting that is reassuring to me. So if you see this, just...idk. Tell me I'm not going insane. Or having a stroke. Or losing myself or my mind of whatever. Tell me I'm just dehydrated, and that the world isn't ending, and that everything is going to be okay. Because every day feels like the fucking apocolypse and my head hurts so bad and I wish I could just feel good and normal and okay.

So I'll try to drink more water (like, wayyy more water) and I'll update you guys. My head feels like it's full of cotton balls right now.

Later, dudes.

#theevilmaninyourcomputer #evilblogging #rant post #vent #hypochondria #someone help #chronic migraine

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darling-i-read-it · 4 years

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Buffet Froid

1x10

Hannibal Lecter x reader x Will Graham

Hannibal Re-Write Series Masterlist

Word Count: 3k

Warnings: spoilers for hannibal, murder, dead bodies, mental health problems

Author’s Note: The art of making it look like i like hannibal when he annoyed the fuck out of me this episode. Also it is so hard to write this cause my HEART i just wanna hug will UGH

I took lines directly from the script so some may seem familiar. Those sentences are not mine.

Official Episode Summary : Two victims' faces are similarly mutilated. For the first time, Will contaminates a crime scene thinking he committed the first murder and an MRI shows he suffers from Advanced Encephalitis.

I don’t own these characters. They belong to author/director

Tag List: @llperfectsymmetryll

(not my gif)

You sat in the car. You were outside of a crime scene, the house looking ominous as it loomed over what had happened inside. There were so many people outside, taking pictures and talking. Will was inside. You had driven him, per his request. You usually didn’t come to the crime scenes but they had been acting off, like he was almost on autopilot when he asked you to take him. Your fingers drummed on the steering wheel as you stared out, trying to catch glimpses of people you knew.

You saw Bev walk out quickly making her way to the car. You rolled down the window and she shook her head a bit as she walked up.

“You should go talk to Will,” she said.

“What happened?” Bev looked back at the house, at Jack who had just exited the house. You looked at her, the worried look on her face evident.

“He contaminated the crime scene. He’s never done that before,” Beverly said. “His hands were around her throat.”

You were surprised to hear that, rightly so. You unlocked the car and got out, walking across the yard beside Beverly who was quick to give anyone a look that even thought about protesting to your presence. Will had come out when you weren’t looking. He was talking to Jack.

“I got lost in the reconstruction. Just for a second. Just a blink,” Will was saying as you walked up to him. Jack barley took notice of your presence but Will looked at you, surprised to see you there by his eyes. He didn’t protest it though. You knew before he could tell you. He had lost some time.

“I know you don’t like to be a subject of concern, but consider me officially concerned,” Jack said. You scoffed and Jack glanced at you but didn’t show any emotion.

“Officially,” Will said.

“About time,” you muttered.

“Wait in the car,” Jack said to you. You raised your hands in defiance.

“I’m here on a warning from Beverly,” you said, glancing at Will. He shook his head.

“I’ll be there soon,” he muttered. You nodded and he reached out to grab your hand and for a second he held it, quietly, looking confused and worried and scared. Your hand slipped from his and you walked over to the car.

“Thought the reason you have me seeing Dr. Lecter and not an FBI psychiatrist is so my mental well-being stays unofficial,” Will muttered, watching you go.

“Have I broken you?” Jack asked. “Is your girlfriend right this time?”

“Do you have anybody that does this better unbroken then I do broken?” Will asked. “And she’s always right.”

“Fear makes you rude, Will,” Jack said as Will walked to the car. His hands shook. He always seemed to be shaking. He stooped at the drivers window and you looked at him, elbow resting on the open window and your hand propped up by your palm.

“We should go to Hannibal after this,” you muttered.

“Why are you here?” he asked. It wasn’t rude. He was only asking.

“You asked me to drive you.” He nodded, glancing back at the house. “I have to look at the body again.” A beat of silence.

“What’s the last thing you remember?”

“Gutting a fish,” he whispered. You nodded. He had gone fishing yesterday though.

“We’ll go to Hannibal’s together.”

“Sit in,” he whispered, referring to the session.

“I will.” He nodded and walked back to the house. You fought the tears threatening to fall from seeing him in so much confusion.

“I can’t remember seeing her dead body before I saw myself killing her,” Will said. He glanced at you sheepishly. You sat on Hannibal’s desk which was your resident spot when you sat into sessions. You didn’t do it often and you only did it with Will’s request or permission. He wanted a witness today, to whatever it is that Hannibal had prepared for him.

“Those memories sank out of sight, yet you’re aware of their absence,” Hannibal inquired. Will was pacing around the room, his mind on fire.

“They left a slick on the surface of my mind where they’re supposed to be,” he said.

“Where you hope they’re supposed to be, but fear they never were.” Will looked haunted. The false memories made him reel. The dying human under his hands had felt so real.

“There’s a grandiosity in the violence I imagined that feels more real than what I knew is true,” he said.

“What do you know to be true?” Hannibal asked.

“I know I didn’t kill her. Couldn’t have. But I remember cutting into her. I remember watching her die.”

“You must overcome these delusions that are disguising your reality. What savage delusions does this killer have?” Hannibal questioned. He was walking around the room as well, but in smaller spaces.

“It wasn’t savage. It was lonely...desperate...sad,” Will said, his eyes glossed over.

“Are you lonely Will?” Hannibal asked. Will shook his head then paused. Your heart sank and you hung off his answer.

“No. That was the killer,” he said. “But I caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror. I looked through me, past me. Like I was a stranger,” he whispered.

“What could this be? It has to be something that we can treat,” you said. Will looked at you and nodded.

“It could be a blood clot. Or a tumor. Just an answer is better than anything,” Will said. Hannibal glanced at you and Will as you stared at each other, nodding in agreement. Your emotions hung off Will’s. It didn’t matter if you were an empath or not. You knew Will well enough to know when enough was enough.

“I can recommend a neurologist. But if it isn’t physiological then you have to accept what you’re struggling with is mental illness,” Hannibal said.

“It isn’t,” you whispered.

Hannibal looked only at you as you seemed to bore holes into the ceiling now. You had a dangerous knowledge of Will Graham. Hannibal thought that might be a problem.

You were with Hannibal and Will into the medical office. You held Will’s hand and he held yours like a lifeline. You sat at chairs beside each other that happened to be far enough away where his hand slipped out of yours. He held them now in his lap, fingers fidgeting.

“What did the headaches start? In earnest?” Dr. Sutcliffe asked. Will glanced at you.

“Two to three months ago,” Will said and you nodded in agreement.

“About the time Will went back into the field,” you said.

“When I met him,” Hannibal added.

“The hallucinations?” Sutcliffe asked.

“I don’t know exactly when they started. I just slowly became aware that I might not be dreaming.”

Hannibal walked with Sutcliffe behind a large piece of glass. You stayed with Will for a few minutes, taking his clothes in his hand as he put on the hospital dress. He let out a small sigh as you looked at him.

“What if nothing comes up?” he asked.

“We’ll deal with that when it comes.”

Will looked at you and you looked at him. He was ready to go but he waited. Eyes glancing around your body wildey.

“If nothing comes up than I am, by definition, likely insane,” he told you quietly. “And if-”

“I’m not going to go anywhere,” you said. Will looked broken. He looked tired. You grabbed his hand and brought it to your lips, kissing the back of it. “I love you.”

His breath seemed to relax. He knew you but he wasn’t sure that when he woke up you would be gone. He might be seriously ill but knowing you were there still made him feel better.

“I love you too.” You kissed him and he kissed you back desperately.

“Go get your brain scanned now. You have lipstick on your lips,” you said as you pulled away. He laughed very subtly adn shrugged, wiping it off with his hand.

“I don’t think it’ll mess up the results.”

“You never know.”

You stood beside Will again before the doctor. He pointed to the brain scan.

“We didn’t find anything abnormal. No vascular malformations, no tumors. No swelling or bleeding. No evidence of stroke. Nothing wrong with you neurologically,” the doctor said. Will’s face was clearly troubled. “Usually when I tell a patient that, they’re happy to hear it.”

“So... what I’m experiencing is psychological?” Will asked.

“Brain scans can’t diagnose a mental disorder. They can only rule out medical illnesses, like a tumor, that can cause similar symptoms.”

“And there’s no chance you’ve mixed up the photos? Or maybe the machine was malfunctioning? I hear that happens,” you said stiffly.

“Y/N,” Will muttered but you shook your head.

“We can do more tests if it’ll make you feel better. Take some blood samples, but I imagine they'll be just as inconclusive.”

For some reason you doubted the truth in that but you didn’t voice it.

You walked into Jack Crawford's office. He took off his glasses and looked up at you, clearly not excited to see you.

“Does Will need something?” Jack asked.

“Stability. A new brain perhaps,” you said. Jack looked you up and down and he knew that you meant business.

“What are you doing here?” he asked, voice monotone.

“Will’s always been a bit odd. Always. It was what drew me to him in the first place,” you said.

“Listen-”

“Shut up.” He shut up. “When Will went back into the field it was because you wanted him to. Will wants to please people. He wants to save lives. He wants to use his gift for good but for each life he saves a little piece of him is burned and singed. You broke Will Jack Crawford and I won’t let you forget it,” you said evenly, looking down at him.

“Do you have a life outside of Will Graham?”

“I did before you broke him and now I have to advocate where he cannot.”

“We were never going to be friends,” Jack said.

“No, no we weren’t.”

Come midnight when Will hadn’t arrived home you woke up. You were getting a suspicious amount of sleep. You had gone to bed, assuming he would be back soon after you fell asleep. Jack sometimes had him out late hours and he was likely to be back. But when you woke up and he was still gone you started to panic a bit.

You calmed yourself, trying to reason that he was maybe still at work. You called his cell. No answer.

You got up out of bed and put on some clothes. With him sleepwalking, losing time, he could be anywhere. You told yourself to add a tracker to his phone.

You got into the car and drove the streets for a few minutes. He wasn’t there. You then drove to Hannibal’s which was the only other place your mind could come up with. You knocked on the door at about 12:30, shaking from the cold and worry. It took Hannibal a moment to come to the door but he eventually did, wearing his robe and rubbing his eyes.

“I thought you were Will,” he admitted.

“Will hasn’t come home yet. He won’t pick up the phone but I’m guessing he’s not here,” you said, looking past him.

“Have you tried the crime scene?” he questioned. You shook your head but that must be where he was. It had to be.

“No but I’ll go there now. I’m sorry to wake you.”

“Don’t apologize.” He was about to shut the door when you turned around but he stopped. “He’ll be there. I’m sure your expertise in finding strays will help,” Hannibal said simply. You nodded and walked back to the car.

On your way there you got a call from Will.

“Where the f-”

“I just sent you the address. Come quickly.” He hung up and you did as you were told, driving faster to the destination you were already going to. You were there in under ten minutes from where you had been on your drive and you got out, walking quickly up to Will.

“I thought you were dead!” you yelled, throwing your arms around him. He shook his head but let you hold him.

“Not yet,” he muttered. “I called Beverly to help me figure out the crime scene,” he said.

“Then why did you tell me to come?”

“Emotional support.” You nodded and held him tighter.

You woke up with a start. Will was thrashing beside you and you put your arm on his side instinctively. You couldn’t tell what had woken you up. It could be anything. The weather, your dreams but you felt like it was something out. You looked around for any disturbances. The dogs were still sleeping but you got up and looked around, trying to find what had woken you.

You walked through the kitchen and the downstairs but you couldn’t find anything. When you were back in the bedroom Will was awake, standing up.

“Where did you go?” he asked.

“Something woke me up. I was trying to figure out what.” You walked back over to him and back into bed.

“Probably wind,” he muttered. You put your arms around him as he got back in too and he put his head on your chest. You kissed his curls.

“Probably,” you whispered.

Will went in for more tests a few days later. He looked up at you as you stood in the same spots you had, with you holding his clothes as he stripped them.

“Jack talked to me,” he said.

“Proceed with caution,” you whispered and he chuckled.

“He thinks I stayed in the job because of the stability. That Jack created stability for me, a foundation.”

“If he keeps going on like that you’re going to be investigating his murder,” you muttered bitterly. “Would you still date me if I murdered someone?” He shrugged.

“I wouldn’t be surprised if you did. I mean, I’d have to consider it.”

“Wrong answer Graham,” you said laughing lightly. He loved these moments. Moments where it was just laughing, joking.

“I would date you if you killed someone. I mean I might have to turn you in but prison can’t be that hard on a relationship,” he said. You nodded.

“Right back at you bubba,” you whispered.

“I have killed someone.”

“And look at you, still a free man.”

After the tests Will walked around, trying to find you or the doctor or someone. You were waiting for him and you walked up with his clothes in hand.

“Have you seen Sutcliffe?” Will asked. You shook your head.

“Not since earlier,” you admitted. “Let’s go find him.” You held his clothes in hand as you walked through the hospital. You peaked in rooms and eventually found Sutcliffes office. You pushed open the door as it was ajar.

You gasped and Will grabbed you and put himself between you and the body, bleeding from a chunk that had been taken out of his face.

“Don’t look,” he whispered.

“I can,” you muttered. “Call Bev.”

The FBI came soon after. Beverly gave Will a look over, Jack concerned he might have had something to do with the murdedr.

“He was with me until he went in. And I would have seen him leave,” you promised. Bev nodded.

“You’re clean. You couldn’t have done this without getting something on you and there’s nothing on you,” Beverly said.

“I don’t feel clean,” Will whispered.

“Murder weapon has the same diseased or damaged tissue on it that we found at Beth LeBeau’s house,” Jimmy explained aloud.

“What connection does this guy have to the first victim?” Will let out a sigh.

“Just me.”

Will woke up and you were already sitting up. He followed your gaze that was at where one of the dogs growled at something under the bed. He grabbed your hand and shook his head.

‘Stay,’ he whispered. You shook your head vigorously and he nodded, getting off the bed and looking underneath. He slid underneath and you leaned your head over the bed, heart pounding in your ears.

“I see you, Georgia,” Will said under the bed. You couldn't see his face. There was a woman under your bed. “Think of who you are. It’s midnight. You’re in Wolf Trap, Virginia. Your name is Georgia Madchen. You are not alone.”

“Am I alive…?” came a voice, a raspy whisper. Will nodded.

You stood with Will in the hospital room, looking down at the living body of the woman who had slept under your bed. You held Will’s hand as he glanced over her.

“She’ll recover,” Will said.

“Hopefully she’ll stay out of our bed,” you whispered.

1x11

#will graham x reader #will graham imagines #hannibal imagines #hannibal lecter x reader #hannibal lecter imagines #hannibal lecter x reader x will graham #will graham x reader x hannibal lecter

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rjalker · 2 years

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Okay there was a lot of stuff going on in my dream at different points but the main thing I remember was that I was Mavis and Quartz again, this time in an alternate universe where instead of being a giant caterpillar, Quartz was an artificial intelligence that had been implanted in Mavis' brain by the Evil Military.

And this time instead of being able to team up to escape, they were successfully enslaved because the military could hack Quartz and force, and thus also Mavis, to comply.

We were part of a """special unit""" that they (the military" pretended was like an intelligence group or researchers or whatever but really we o my existed to be experimented on.

Something dramatic was happening somewhere so the military shut down all the (high tech fancy and futuristic) roads and had the army marching towards whatever was happening, with the few airplanes capable of surviving in the atmosphere (which was apparently super corrosive to metal and stuff once you got above the tree canopy, which made flying in metal planes dangerous and stupid) going that way.

Oh and apparently the thing that was happening? Aliens invading. Or at least that's what the military thought was happening. They weren't actually aliens, they were just a different species of people from the higher elevations. And they weren't invading. They'd been living up in the sky in that area for thousands of years, no one had ever noticed before because the airplanes had only just been invented and become safe enough that pilots could survive going that high. The dream decided to just tell me this.

Anyways the ""Special"" unit got almost to the front lines before they stopped us and had us march to a hospital the military had taken over (and by taken over i mean they'd already controlled it because they were fascists but now they were making it even more obvious it belonged to them)

They gave us food and were pretending to be nice lol but the food had been laced with DNA and stuff from the ""alien invaders"". They were trying to turn us into them so that they could study us instead of trying to capture one of them.

Well we figured that out and then I (as in me, me, not Mavis or Quartz) had to mentally sit there and do a ton of urgent math trying to figure out how many hits I'd be able to get in before I bled to death.

Because the Evil Doctor that was going to experiment on us had a scalpel that was covered in some sort of chemical that would stop blood from clotting, so if you got cut, you'd keep bleeding.

At this point I was semi lucid. Which meant I was lucid enough to transform into a werewolf, but not lucid enough to not die. Even though I was aware of the fact that I was aware, but not aware enough, lol.

But then the Evil Scientist started to threaten one of the other people (named Jean, apparently), and I decided fuck it, if I die I'll just wake up, no harm done.

So I transformed, but not in the way I normally do. Apparently Mavis and Quartz have a werewolf form with black fur, with much shorter arms than I normally have.

Which is very inconvenient when you are trying to avoid being stabbed by a magical scalpel, but okay.

I managed to kill the Evil Doctor but I lost a bunch of fingers and got stabbed a bunch of times. But the good news is apparently the """alien""" DNA they'd infected us with was helping me to not-die by.....replacing my blood??? with some other thing. So I wasn't bleeding anymore, but I also didn't have normal blood lol. No idea what it was, it was kinda like the inside of an aloe leaf(?) so maybe the sky people were plants?

And then the other people from the ""special unit"" escaped and obviously brought me with them since they weren't assholes.

And then the dream changed and I was doing iNaturalist but there were Giant Fire Lizards and they kept chasing me when I tried taking pictures of them. And then possibly I killed the queen of england. I hope so. And something about Battlestar Galactica. IDK.

#Rjalker has weird dreams #long post

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theewildflowers · 3 years

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dramione fanfic recs

I’ve fallen into the Dramione fanfiction hole lately due to a friend’s recent obsession with Dramione and Draco Malfoy tik tok, so I wanted share some favorite stories I’ve read, especially with those who are also new to the pairing. Many of the fics below are pretty popular within the fandom, but maybe there will be something new as well for those who come across this post.

I’ve included the rating and word count in parenthesis, and the fics are set in the magical universe unless otherwise noted. Please mind the tags when you click through—many fics may have triggers. Happy reading!

wait and hope by mightbewriting (M, 95k) “Harry,” Hermione began, voice very controlled, but she could feel the blade of panic slicing at her vocal cords. “Why was Draco Malfoy just screaming bloody murder about his,” and the word almost strangled her as she said it, “wife?” Harry's green eyes blew wide. Healer Lucas pinched the bridge of her nose, clearly displeased with the recent series of events. “He was referring to you, my dear,” she said. “That was the other question you got wrong. Your name is Hermione Jean Granger-Malfoy.”

Part of the Wait and Hope story universe. Draco’s POV, Beginning and End, is a WIP. (I’ve read and reread Wait and Hope multiple times in a few weeks span, so it’s safe to say that it’s my favorite Dramione story universe.)

the politician’s wife by Pir8fancier (M, 66k) This story is set twenty-three years after the fall of Voldemort. Our main characters are Ministry employees, middle-aged, and the majority of them not very happy. (This was the first Dramione fic I’ve ever read and is still one of my favorites)

the right thing to do by LovesBitca8 (E, 176k) Hermione felt the pounding in her ears again. She would see him for the first time since the Great Hall, gaunt and stricken at the Slytherin table with his mother clutching his arm. She hadn't meant to look for him. Not in the corridors, not beneath the white sheets of the fallen, not on the way to the Chamber of Secrets with Ron, but she was a stupid girl. Part of the Rights and Wrongs story universe (highly recommend Draco’s POV, All the Wrong Things, as well).

remain nameless by HeyJude19 (E, WIP) The monotony of Draco’s daily routine had become both a lifeline and a noose. But this new habit of grabbing coffee with Hermione Granger is quickly becoming a reason to get out of bed and is unfortunately forcing him to re-evaluate his inconsequential existence.

seeker fit by selinyu and etlithien (T, 2.6k) “Will the Head Girl grace the pitch with her presence for today’s match?” The timbre of Malfoy’s cool lilting drawl slid down Hermione’s spine. I recommend all the fics in the SenLithien Dramione Collaboration collection.

breath mints / battle scars by Onyx_and_Elm (E, 148k) For a moment, she's almost giddy. Because Draco Malfoy's been ruined by this war and he's as out of place as she is and — yes, he has scars too. He's got an even bigger one. She wonders whether one day they'll compare sizes.

apple pies and other amends by ToEatAPeach (M, 76k) It’s not until she’s brought a basil and strawberry sponge cake to Neville Longbottom and his new girlfriend, Hannah Abbott, a dozen rhubarb hand-pies to Luna and Xenophilius Lovegood, and another basket of ganache-covered muffins to Dean and Seamus, that Hermione admits to herself what she’s actually doing: she’s making a thing of this. It’s a veritable PTSD tour. With pastries. And hand-skimmed clotted cream. And she has no idea why she’s doing it, but it’s becoming very apparent that she is.

clean and marked by olivieblake (M, 118k and 178k) Malfoy's handsome face was contoured into a condescending smirk. "No faith in that giant brain of yours, Granger?" She looked up at him defiantly. "Maybe I don't have faith in you!" she said, raising her voice. Malfoy only looked at her. "You'll find I'm very surprising." Basically a sixth year retelling.

the best of me by MrsRen (E, 148k) Officially, Hermione Granger was killed in action during the Battle of Hogwarts. Unofficially, Draco Malfoy has never stopped searching for her. Years after the war during a mission in France, his salvation comes in the form of a little blond boy and a familiar half-Kneazle.

fortuitous by MrsRen (M, 93k) Recently divorced Draco doesn't believe in the ideology of having one true love. He certainly doesn't expect to meet his match in a Halloween themed coffee shop, but fate has a peculiar way of giving you just what you need.

bring him to his knees by Musyc (E, WIP) Draco is on the case of a murderer, but to investigate, he needs a fake relationship - and a kink club play partner. When Hermione volunteers to take the role, both do their best to maintain the lie without letting each other know the truth: neither of them are acting.

looking glass by kyonomiko (M, 99k) No one knows what happened to Draco Malfoy in the final battle, but, when his portrait shows up at Harry Potter's house, it's readily assumed he didn't make it. Hermione's perspective on the wizard starts to change as she learns more about who he really was. The more she knows, the more tragic his apparent demise seems to be.

isolation by bex-chan (E, 264k) He can't leave the room. Her room. And it's all the Order's fault. Confined to a small space with only the Mudblood for company, something's going to give. Maybe his sanity. Maybe not. "There," she spat. "Now your Blood's filthy too!"

thirty-five by raven_maiden (M, 2.3k) It's Draco Malfoy's birthday, and you'd think he'd have some say in the matters concerning his birthday. Then again, the will of four other Malfoys is hard to overcome. Part of Meet the Malfoys collection.

apples & cream by LovesBitca8 (E, 1.4k) She could have taken her things and gone through his Floo without a word. She could have ignored him on Monday morning, as though last night had been no more than a fever dream and too much Firewhisky. But she’d come back to bed.

universal truths by scullymurphy (E, 145k, pride & prejudice inspired AU) Hermione Granger is a woman of intelligence and spirit. Draco Malfoy is a man of wealth and privilege. When they meet again, a decade after the second great wizarding war—they are not impressed. But when circumstances throw them together, dislike turns to attraction, attraction turns to passion and passion may turn into something more... If they can stay out of their own way and let love take its course.

my brown-eyed girl by PacificRimbaud (M, 2k) "Give it up, Granger. We've had our N.E.W.T. results for a week. What can possibly have earned your continued academic devotion in the last four days of term?" Draco and Hermione have a lazy snuggle in the grass behind the Quidditch pitch.

bite marks by provactive_envy (E, 19.4k, muggle AU) Draco’s mouth falls open. He clutches his cookie and ignores the shower of crumbs littering his grey cashmere fingerless gloves. He can’t decide if he wants to fuck this girl or fight with her. Maybe both? Maybe at the same time?

thirteenth night by Nelpher (M, 78k) When Hermione is assigned to keep tabs on a memory-charmed Draco, she is faced with a decision that could change her life forever.

familiar faces, worn out places by LovesBitca8 (E, 7k) “You are at St. Mungo’s. You were in a coma.” He looks me over again, taking a pause. “I am a Healer here now,” he says, like it explains something. My fingers stretch, drifting across his sleeve. He looks down, like I’ve thrown mud at him. Forcing my vocal chords together for the first time, I whisper, “What’s your name?”

bone mortar by mightbewriting (M, 10k, muggle AU) Draco clenched his teeth, forcing sharp, shallow breaths through his nose as he ripped open the door to his usual lecture hall only to find— someone at his desk. Well, he supposed it was technically less his desk and more the desk as he didn’t actually own this particular classroom. But since he’d taught in it for the last four semesters in a row he at least felt like he’d earned common law ownership of some sort.

of mongolian fireflies and russian sharpclaws by barnettdidit (T, 37k) As colleagues for the F.A.U.C.E.T. (Fetching And Uncovering Creatures Experiencing Terror) department, Draco and Hermione have had their fair share of arguments. When they face their hardest case yet, mixed with an odd swarm of fireflies that glow in the colour according to how they feel about each other, Hermione is struggling to keep a straight mind.

a muggle-born magic by Musyc (M, 50k, regency era AU) Physician's daughter Hermione Granger finds herself in need of a way to pay off her father's debts after his death. Draco Malfoy, retired from the politics of the Isolationists, a group of pure-bloods bent on separating 'true' magic from lesser folk, finds himself in need of a tutor for his son, Scorpius, who appears to be incapable of magic and must learn to survive in a world without it. Draco also needs a wife and mother for Scorpius, to satisfy a promise to his unwell father. After she saves his son from an attack by Isolationists, Draco hires the Muggle-born Miss Granger for the former, and after a riot in Vauxhall Gardens and a scandalous discovery made by his mother, weds that selfsame Muggle-born for the latter. While making the best of her marriage of (in)convenience, Hermione discovers that Scorpius' history of wild imaginings and dreams is more than just imagination. As she attempts to teach him about magical abilities no one expected he would ever have, she and Draco work together to raise Scorpius and learn to trust each other.

aurelian by BittyBlueEyes (T, 255k) Two years after the war, a young stranger pays a visit to the burrow. His arrival alone is baffling, but the news he brings of an upcoming war turns the world upside down. Hermione's quiet, post-war life will never be the same.

malfoy shrugged by uselessenglishmajor (E, 11k) February 14th is just another day at the office for Hermione Granger. Shame no one else got the memo.

distance by In_Dreams (T, 138k) She’s a novice Unspeakable trying to earn her stripes. He’s a shafted Auror desperate to prove himself. When they end up forced together on a shared assignment, neither is willing to back down. But when the mission pulls them into an ancient world of mystery and adventure, they find themselves depending on each other in a race against time.

nonscents by In_Dreams (M, 10k) Granger's Amortentia smells like him and Draco can't understand why. More importantly, he can't let her figure it out.

correspondence by olivieblake (T, 5k) Every year, Draco insists that Hermione take a picture for their Christmas card. Why? Hell if she knows, but if it will make him happy, so be it.

sandalwood and gardenias by secondbutton (E, 9k) A balanced fragrance of sandalwood and something musky and earthy followed him like a shroud. Draco Malfoy smelled like a magical forest’s best kept secret. Like the moment following a storm when the sun peeks back over the clouds and living beings stop what they’re doing and pause to marvel at being able to roam outside again. It was a crisp top note with more robust undertones, and just a hint of sweetness. She thought she might love the scent if it lived on anyone else other than him.

#dramione #draco malfoy #hermione granger #fanfiction recs #fanfic recs #little to no ron weasley bashing #dramione fanfics #dramione fanfic recs #fic recs #dramione fic recs

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luxaofhesperides · 3 years

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there in the tower.

A Sleeping Beauty inspired dark fantasy fic.

for ORV RARE PAIR WEEK 2021 @orv-week; day one, prompt: fairy tale

also on ao3.

. . .

They say that the dragon is guarding a princess. After all, dragons will always kidnap princesses and no one else. Who else is so valuable? So important in the kingdom? So weak? So when the dragon flew through the sky and curled around the base of a large tower, it seemed obvious that there was a princess inside, awaiting rescue.

Here’s the thing, though: Na Bori is not a princess.

She’s a seamstresses daughter, a common girl who doesn’t attract much attention from others. So why had the dragon taken her?

Of course, Lee Jihye had no way to know for sure that Na Bori was taken until she actually goes to the tower, but Na Bori had disappeared and a dragon appeared the next day. There were investigations, of course; nobility keeps track of their daughters and what bloodlines they marry into. Every princess and noble girl in the continent is accounted for. People have speculated that there may be a missing princess, perhaps born out of wedlock, or a sickly, weak girl who had never been introduced to society. And then they wondered if they should even bother rescuing the kidnapped girl if they weren’t respectably nobility.

Lee Jihye had to run out of town because of that one. Apparently starting a bar fight and smashing a chair over a marquis’ son is a bad move.

The barely suppressed panic thrums in her chest, filling the empty spaces between her ribs as she continues her journey to the tower.

No one has seen Na Bori since the dragon appeared. No one had looked, either. Who would care for a seamstresses daughter? But Lee Jihye has been besides Na Bori for years, has grown up with her, has never known anyone so bright and clever and kind.

The thought of Na Bori gone forever, trapped in a tower because no one cared to look makes her furiously blink tears out of her eyes. No one else is looking, but Lee Jihye. She would never stop until Na Bori was safe by her side again.

Here’s another thing: Lee Jihye is not a knight. She is training to be one, under the instruction of an old warrior who has settled down to live the last years of his life in peace. There are other knights and princes traveling to the tower, fighting beasts and bandits in order to rescue the poor maiden trapped besides a dragon, hoping to gain glory and honor for their deeds. Lee Jihye just wants her best friend back.

It’s easy enough to avoid them; Lee Jihye’s been dodging them for weeks, knowing she’s too tense to handle anyone’s company. These nobles are planning to gain fame or riches or a wife out of this. The last knight who had said something about pitiful women always clinging to their saviors got his teeth knocked out and a concussion from how hard Lee Jihye punched him. She left him lying on the side of the road, fists shaking as she desperately tried to erase thoughts of Na Bori married to a pig like him.

The less time spent with others, the better.

She cuts down another branch in her way and dives deeper into the forests that surround the castle.

“But what if you get sent far away?” she asks, stabbing her needle especially viciously through the fabric.

Lee Jihye is rather happy that Na Bori doesn’t want her to go. The rare occasion where Na Bori clings to Lee Jihye instead of the other way around are moments memorized and held onto fondly. She knows that there is no one in this world closer to her than Na Bori, knows that she’s the person who knows Na Bori best, but it’s nice to hear that she’s wanted.

Smiling, Lee Jihye reaches out and takes one of Na Bori’s hands, stopping her from tearing through the fabric. “I’ll still come back,” she promises, “Where else would I come home to?”

“And if you get hurt?”

“I’ll just get strong enough that nothing can hurt me.”

Na Bori is mollified, and it shows in how she relaxes and finally sets down her sewing. “You still have a long way to go then. Strong knights don’t cry over a little tumble down the hill.”

Lee Jihye flushes and scowls. “Hey! It was my first assignment and it was a steep hill. I hit a lot of things on the way down! It hurt! If anything, it would be weird if I wasn’t

crying when she wakes up. Lee Jihye faintly hears Na Bori’s voice whisper, “Crybaby,” but it’s only wistful thinking. Forcing her aching body up, Lee Jihye wipes away her tears and prepared herself for another agonizing day cutting through the thorny and impossibly large brambles that block entry to the tower.

“Okay,” she tells herself, “You’re almost there. Na Bori is waiting for you, so you can’t give up yet.”

Many of the others have turned back. She no longer sees other groups making their way to the tower. It’s been eerily silent for the past two days.

If she had been anyone else, if she had been sane, Lee Jihye would have turned around too. The entire area felt unwelcoming, downright hostile sometimes, and made every nerve in her body scream at her to turn around. A heavy pit of despair grows in her stomach and the hopelessness it causes makes her physically sick a few times.

Still, Lee Jihye presses onwards.

The longer it takes, the more she worries, her brain providing morbid images of Na Bori’s body rotting in the tower, or being eaten by the dragon, or any other terrible thing that could happen to kidnapped people. It has Lee Jihye on the verge of a nervous breakdown, and she’s been teetering on that cliff for a few days now.

There’s no doubt that the area around the tower is full of dark magic. It gets into her head, twists around her bones, squeezes the air out of her lungs and slowly suffocates her each day. It gives her nightmares, makes her relive memories that feel like they’re happening again, like Na Bori is there with her only for wakefulness to destroy the illusions. Lee Jihye has only been in this dark magic infected forest for two days. Na Bori has been missing for a week and a half.

The fear she feels for Na Bori and what she’s had to endure only makes things worse.

Lee Jihye hacks through another large thorny bramble and continues in deeper, ignoring the weariness that makes her want to collapse and never get up. Thorns have caught on her with each step she takes; most of the cuts clot up quickly, but the rest leave a trail of blood to guide her back out.

The tower doesn’t look any closer.

She lifts her heavy arms to cut through another branch.

Na Bori shrieks and jumps onto Lee Jihye, clinging with all her might. Startled, Lee Jihye stumbles back a few steps, trying to regain her balance without dropping Na Bori. She wraps her arms around Na Bori, holding her up, and looks around for the source of her distress.

Crawling across the road is a centipede.

Lee Jihye can’t help but laugh, easily carrying Na Bori away from it, continuing down the road to her house.

Na Bori, still holding onto Lee Jihye and making no moves to get down, smacks her shoulder. “Don’t laugh!”

“I can’t believe you call me a crybaby when you jump into my arms as soon as you see a bug.”

“It’s a perfectly reasonably fear! Nothing should have that many legs, or those weird eyes, or pincers, or--ugh!” She shudders, scaring herself by imagining the very things she hates about bugs.

It’s cute, how insistent she is that bugs are weird, gross, and wholly unnatural. Lee Jihye has listened to these complaints for many years, and she wouldn’t mind listening for many years more.

“Don’t worry,” she says, adjusting her grip around Na Bori’s waist. “I’ll always be here to rescue you from the evil, scary bugs.”

Na Bori tucks her face into the crook of Lee Jihye’s neck. Her warm breath sends shivers down her spine; it takes everything in her not to stumble or drop Na Bori.

“My valiant knight,” she says, and Lee Jihye can hear the smile in her voice.

Who needs kings and queens? The only person she ever wants to dedicate her sword to is already in her arms. And if asked, Lee Jihye would gladly dedicate the rest of her life.

It’s just. There are little moments between them, where Lee Jihye thinks Na Bori also wants more, wants to push the limits of their friendship into new territory, but what if it’s just wistful thinking? They’ve shared what feels like their whole lives together, and there’s no guarantee that Na Bori wouldn’t leave one day. But if she stayed… If she stayed, Lee Jihye would give

up and let the brambles consume her body. She doesn’t know how long it’s been, how far she’s gone. Dreams and reality feel the same and she can’t quite tell which is which anymore. The tower is still the same distance away it was when she first saw it rising above the brambles.

Everything hurts. Her ears are ringing. She’s been bleeding sluggishly for days now, always torn apart by new thorns. There’s no point in trying to patch herself up when the next set of brambles is ready to rip her flesh apart.

The tip of her sword drags through the dirt. She’s given up trying to cut a path through to the towers. Instead, Lee Jihye settles for twisting between the branches, uncaring for the thorns that reach out for her greedily.

Whatever dark magic saturates this place is slowly killing her. Lee Jihye doesn’t know much about magic as she’s never had a talent for it, but she knows enough to understand that this is incredibly powerful and dangerous magic.

What does it have to do with Na Bori?

The answer is: nothing good. Who cares about the specifics? All Lee Jihye has to know is that the magic is going to (if it hasn’t already) hurt Na Bori. The need to save her from this, to bring her back somewhere safe, is what keeps her going despite how painful it is.

As much as her body screams at her to give up and just lie down until she withers away, Lee Jihye pushes forwards, ignoring every ache and cut and bruise.

She will get to the tower.

Na Bori will come home.

Their hands bump together and they both reflexively jerk away. The air between them is awkward for a moment, then Na Bori laughs and picks up the last apple slice and brings it up to Lee Jihye’s lips.

"Here,” she says sweetly, and Lee Jihye takes a bite, watches the juice trail down her fingers and wants more than anything to lick it away, to press kisses against Na Bori’s nimble hands, wants

to cry, to scream, to just be done with it. The tower looms above her, no closer and no farther, mocking her and she twists herself through another bramble, wincing as a thorn drags along her arm, beads of blood beginning to

fall into the river. The colorful leaves line the banks of the river and Lee Jihye watches as Na Bori carefully shifts through piles of leaves, searching for the mushrooms that she needed for dinner.

“Jihye, come here!” she calls, waving her over.

And Lee Jihye goes, as she always does. “What is it? Did you find

a way in, but it’s all just stone. No doors, no windows, just stone. She finally got past those horrible brambles, and now that she’s at the tower she can’t find a way in. It’s too tall for her to climb with her how exhausted she is. There’s no way up.

Lee Jihye can’t help but cry, screaming in frustration as she presses the heels of her palms against her eyes, trying to breathe through the sobs that force themselves out of her chest.

The magic has only gotten stronger. Dreams, memories, reality, it’s all mixing together. One moment she’s walking through town with Na Bori, the next she’s trying not to gut herself on a large thorn. One moment she’s cutting down a branch and the next she’s waking up then walking past the brambles then waking up and seeing Na Bori smile then waking up and waking up and waking up but she can’t remember falling asleep.

Is this a dream? Is she awake? Is the tower before her real or is this just another illusion?

She’s come all this way. She can’t go back, not without finding a way in that fucking

tower over her and Lee Jihye is sobbing as she watches they push Na Bori into the river. The one holding her back is laughing meanly, saying something about how no one would care about what happens to them, just two poor common girls who only have each other, bet their parents wouldn’t even notice them gone.

N a Bori is coughing up water in-between insults, and Lee Jihye whimpers as her arm is twisted more and more and any more will hurt her, will break her bones, their hands are too big and strong and no one is coming to save them and

"Get up Jihye!”

There is a dragon curled around the tower. It’s smaller than what she expected. Smaller than what she remembers. It stares at her, but it doesn’t attack.

It looks just as tired as she is.

“Hey,” Lee Jihye rasps out. “I just want her back. Please.”

The dragon huffs and drops its head to the ground. There is a collar around its neck, digging into its flesh. Dried blood colors the edges of the collar, and Lee Jihye feels sick to her stomach. Whatever magic is taking place here is vile enough to hurt a dragon, a creature of pure magic from the core of the planet.

Killing the dragon would be an act of mercy.

Lee Jihye approaches. It watches and doesn’t move. Its golden eyes are so tired; the dragon has already given up.

She raises her sword.

They are seven years old when they first meet. The new seamstress in town is delighted to see that her daughter will have a friend her age. She waves the two of them off to play and goes back into her store, ready to get started on mending clothes.

Na Bori grins, bright and lively; it’s the biggest smile Lee Jihye has ever seen, and she’s instantly enamoured.

"Hi! I’m Na Bori. Wanna play?”

"Sure! I’m Lee Jihye, I live down there,” she points behind them to the cluster of houses near the fields, “and you’re the first person I’ve met who’s my age!”

Na Bori doesn’t waste any more time talking. She grabs Lee Jihye’s wrist and drags her along. It’s the first touch she’s felt from someone outside her family that didn’t hurt. She’s gotten used to hiding from the local bullies and crying when they were done with her, but Na Bori’s hand around her wrist is what makes her feel like she’s splintering apart.

It’s a good feeling.

She follows along behind Na Bori, and remembers that kind touch whenever she thinks about why she loves Na Bori so much.

The collar falls to the ground. It was hard work cutting through it, but just because Lee Jihye doesn’t have a talent for magic doesn’t mean she can’t use it. It’s all about mana direction and intent. This forest is full of mana that feels rotten and wounded, but it is mana nonetheless, and Lee Jihye has spent days in it. It’s easy enough to focus on the memory of the first kindness another child showed her and use that to fuel the intent of help rather than harm .

The dragon blinks and some life returns to its eyes. It watches her carefully as she sheathes her sword and wipes the sweat off her brow.

“I helped you get out of the collar. Please help me too.”

And it does.

The dragon nudges its nose against her stomach and lets her climb on. She holds onto it’s large horns as it ascends and circles the tower. There is a single window in this entire tower, up at the top, and it is there that the dragon stops, using its claws to dig into the stone walls and cling to the tower so that Lee Jihye can climb in through the window.

It rumbles at her softly, and Lee Jihye pats its nose. “I’ll be back soon.”

The inside of the tower is dark save for the light that comes in through the window. It’s full of books and bones, strange symbols drawn on the wall and the floor. There is a man collapsed against a table, gaunt and covered in dried blood. His chest moves, the only sign that he’s not dead, and symbols are cut into his skin, turned black from channeling dark magic.

Lee Jihye doesn’t hesitate to run him through with her sword. He dies silently, not knowing the danger he was in the moment he stole Na Bori away.

That is, if Na Bori is even here. If she isn’t, Lee Jihye is going to have a breakdown, then go out and continue her search. But she’s sure that Na Bori is here.

She has to be.

In the back is another set of stairs that winds up, and Lee Jihye climbs them, leaving her sword out just in case.

It’s much darker up here, but still Lee Jihye can make out the bed and a person lying in it. There’s a table besides the bed, full of sharp objects she doesn’t know the use for, and small vials of blood. Dread fills Lee Jihye and she approaches the bed to get a closer look at who is on it.

Na Bori sleeps peacefully.

Her arms are bare and full of healing cuts. Lee Jihye collapses, half-laughing half-sobbing in relief. She reaches out and shakes Na Bori, trying to rouse her from her slumber, but Na Bori doesn’t stir.

She’s as still as a corpse.

Lee Jihye shakes her harder, then pats her cheek. “Bori-ya? Hey, Bori-ya, I’m here. I’m here to take you home. Wake up, will you? Please, wake up.”

Na Bori remains motionless. She’s never been a deep sleeper, or a still one. Seeing her so still and silent terrifies Lee Jihye.

“Please,” she whispers, grasping one of Na Bori’s hands and pressing her forehead against it. “Please, wake up.”

Lee Jihye sobs. She went through all this and now that she’s here, it doesn’t matter. Because Na Bori is stuck in a magical sleep that Lee Jihye can’t wake her from.

Desperate, Lee Jihye pulls on the rotting mana around them. Blood drips from her nose as she pushes herself through exhaustion and pain, letting the decay take root in her body as she tries to use magic to break Na Bori out of her enchanted sleep. It hurts so much, behind her eyes, in her throat, around her heart. It hurts but there’s nothing else she can do, so Lee Jihye keeps pulling the mana in, then pushing it into Na Bori through their joined hands, wishing wake up wake up wake up come back to me please I missed you so much please come back I want to go home please don’t make me leave you .

She’s not made for magic. Doesn’t really know how to use it and it takes a toll on her body. She barely notices that she’s stopped crying. She just doesn’t have the energy to make tears.

Lee Jihye resigns herself to death. Better than leaving without Na Bori. She slumps over, slowly losing her strength. Na Bori sleeps on.

They were supposed to have a future together. She wanted to find the courage to confess to Na Bori, to make a life with her, to become a knight for her. She wanted so much but she’ll never get it because their story ends here.

These are her final moments. She’s allowed to be greedy. Lee Jihye leans down and kisses Na Bori; their first and last kiss. She presses her lips against Na Bori’s mouth and just stays there, tired and weak.

Na Bori takes a breath.

And she kisses back.

"Why do you want to be a knight? Isn’t it scary?”

Was it? Lee Jihye had always thought the stories of adventures and fighting monsters was really cool. She says as much to Na Bori, who scrunches up her nose.

“But what if you get hurt or run into a really scary monster?” she asks, clutching the skirt of her dress in her fists, knuckles white.

“Then I’d fight back and come to you so you could help me! Being a knight might be a little scary, but I’d also be strong enough to defeat any scary thing that I find.”

“Would you save me if I was in danger?”

Lee Jihye grins and grabs Na Bori’s hand to link their pinkies together. “I promise that I will always save you.”

Na Bori has to support Lee Jihye as they both stumble down the stairs and make their way to the window, where the dragon is waiting. It coos at them, concerned, and Lee Jihye manages a weak smile that seems to reassure it.

They somehow manage to get onto the dragon, holding onto ridges of its back as it takes off and flies them away from the oppressive force of black magic.

“Jihye?” Na Bori murmurs from behind her, arms wrapped around Jihye’s waist as she leans against her back. “Thank you for coming to save me. I kept dreaming of you and our promise.”

“I told you didn’t I? I’ll always save you.” Lee Jihye wishes she could be cooler when she says it, but she’s exhausted and the relief of having Na Bori with her makes her voice small and weak.

Na Bori presses a kiss to the back of her neck. “Sleep. I’ll take care of you until we get home.”

Feeling like a child again, experiencing her first kind touch from another, Lee Jihye relaxes against Na Bori, and lets herself drift off as her heart splinters and fractures, then comes together whole.

#orv #orv week #omniscient reader's viewpoint #orv fic #lee jihye #na bori #lee jihye/na bori #my writing

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zephyr-together · 3 years

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it’s been exactly one month since top surgery! here’s a summary of what all went down! disclaimer: please do not feel that you need to feel pressured to remember things from this post or any other, your doctor should instruct you on the most important things to do or not do, and also this is my experience and everyone’s will be different!

I saw Dr. Kenneth Wolf! I highly recommend him if you’re in the area or able to get to him, very skilled and very cheap (only was $5400, $5900 if you get nipple grafts which I ended up deciding not to have) there is a 250 lb weight limit though, they weigh you the day of surgery so if you’re unsure if you’ll be able to make it I’d suggest seeing a surgeon who operates more on plus sized folks

he was/is SUPER booked, I had my consultation in October and had to schedule surgery in June. this made me confident I made the right decision though because of how many people go to him, and having to be stuck in the body I didn’t want for a lot longer than I thought made me more eager to have it so I wasn’t as scared as I would have been otherwise. that being said, it might be smart to ask ahead how long the wait time is so that you can save during that time! because I didn’t know about the wait I had already had most of my money that I got together since last June so I could’ve had it about four months sooner, but hey everything worked out in the end :)

speaking of saving money, for this doctor there’s a $500 down payment that I paid when I went to the consultation visit (if you’re out of the area they can do consultation over email btw!) the rest was collected about a week and a half before surgery. I have a debit card so it had to be split up in three transactions. I’m very thankful they worked with me on that!

I went into a small room where the doctor met me, marked me up and took my picture. then he said the anesthesiologist would meet me, which she did in a few minutes and went over a bit of questions/paperwork and took me to the operating room!

I lied down on a table with my arms out, it felt like I was an alien getting vivisected, that combined with my needlephobia made that a bit scary but I’ve been waiting so long so it was exciting too. they had me hooked up to an IV but I think they did that while I was under because I felt the needle go in and then out. and then in a minute I was out!

I wasn’t aware of this because it was during the surgery but they have a machine to massage your legs to keep up circulation and I had a tube down my throat too. when I woke up the first thing I hear is “the surgery was a success!! :D” and it felt like a weird dream because of anesthesia but in what felt like a few minutes I was almost as awake as normal which was surprising because I was out of it for hours after getting wisdom teeth out so I thought this would be way worse in that way

I had three intense sensations when I woke up: nausea, tightness and hunger. they asked right away if I was nauseous and gave me an alcohol patch to put on my nose which immediately took the feeling completely away. I had a very specific craving for Burger King’s impossible whopper, I think that’s because of not being able to eat I wanted something substantial like meat (vegetarian so closest thing to it) and something QUICK because hungy

the tightness was pretty intense and unexpected, I felt desperate to rip off my surgical vest but they assured me it’s actually fairly loose. I think it’s just the incisions that give you a tight sensation but what you see and feel on your body is the vest so your brain says that’s the culprit I think. as time went on I ended up feeling desperate for the vest actually but I’ll go into that later

when I got the whopper I’m VERY thankful my dad who met us after picking it up also got the milkshake because I couldn’t produce saliva at all and didn’t know that would happen. I think that’s from having the tube in my mouth. I also could barely hold anything with my left hand because of that being the arm I had the IV in, but both the no saliva and limp left hand things went away in a few hours I think

by the time we got home which was I think an hour and a half after I woke up, I had really intense pain in my throat and under my armpits. the painkillers they gave me eventually kicked in about an hour or so after I took them, I’d suggest to bring them to surgery maybe if possible so you can take them asap, I think I wouldn’t have had that at all if I did, at that level of intensity anyway. for my throat I basically went nuts and drank water, had popsicles, ice cream, fruit, cough syrup, etc and it went away in 2-3 days or so

speaking of the pain under my armpits, that was from the tubes in me to drain extra unwanted blood and puss and stuff like that, it sounds super awful but I wasn’t allowed to remove the vest for five days and I’m naturally sweaty so I didn’t even know there were tubes in me or that I was draining until like four days later. I was stuffed with tons of gauze under the vest so eventually when I did notice the drainage we pulled out the dirty ones and pushed in some clean ones (they provide you with the same kind of gauze). the main awful thing about it was just the idea of having tubes in me, it didn’t bother me so much when I thought it was part of the incision haha...

now that I complained about the tube and throat pain I will say the “pain” for me of the actual incision area was almost nothing for me at all, just a bit of a weird tingly or pokey sensation every so often and that’s all really. but again everyone is different !

appetite was funny because it felt like I’d feel really hungry and eat hardly anything and feel good! another post suggested to have pineapple to help with bruising and I think it worked because I ate pineapple constantly and had pretty much no bruising at all

also I hope this isn’t too gross but I couldn’t pee and I was constipated. it wasn’t too much trouble because for the. pee I could just push and it’d come and for constipation that’s a problem that happens for me in general. both took about a week to wear off. they’re side effects of anesthesia I believe. other side effects I had from that were my legs and arms would feel pretty sore at times and my legs were wobbly, they said that I’d need to move my legs around a bit every once in a while to prevent clotting and I got a bit nervous about that so I ended up going for two walks a day! probably not needed to do that much but I think it helped speed up leg recovery

after that more intense pain was gone after just a few hours I felt fine to watch shows and play viddy games! I thought I’d be zonked out for days or something but I was pretty alert after just a few minutes of coming out like I said. I could’ve probably drawn or made plushies too but it just felt so weird to move my arms at that point and was probably for the best I didn’t and just watched stuff and played games and slept a lot. it felt a bit frustrating how boring it was at times after a week or so but I just focused on how much of my life I’ll feel good now because of this so the recovery time isn’t that bad knowing that

five days after the surgery I had my first post op appointment! this was for the doctor to inspect the incisions, give us ointment to put on the scars and more gauze, and to finally be able to throw away all of the gauze that was under the vest! at this point I was allowed to take off the vest to replace the gauze and put ointment on as well as shower, and was given bandaids to put on the tubes for showering. however the sensation of not having the vest on at this point was SO horrible to me, I felt like a doll that was being pulled and unraveled apart, it made me want to throw up too so I took a shower as fast as possible and then just opted to get my hair shampooed at salons every other day for a couple weeks, so in retrospect I could have not gone five days with no shampoo but nothing can go absolutely perfectly after all!

a couple days later I ran out of oxycodone and tried replacing it with motrin which gave me three vivid nightmares in a row of having really bad fights with my parents and friend over dumb things which sounds silly but it messed me up emotionally and I kept sobbing uncontrollably out of nowhere that I felt like such a burden to take care of. I thought I was just emotional from the surgery but as soon as I switched to tylenol that went away completely! I don’t think it’s that motrin is bad because I looked it up and it’s a rare side effect, it’s just either that my body specifically doesn’t like it or it was the way it was combined with the antibiotic I had

the second post op was to remove the tubes and it was 13 days after the first post op. they said if you live out of the area you can remove the tubes yourself so I’m very thankful we’re in the area haha. the left tube came out so smooth and quick that I didn’t feel it even come out at all! the second hurt for a second but I think because it kept getting bent backwards but it didn’t hurt too much. the tubes were SUPER wiggly and actually pretty flat so I think they’re constantly improving them to make them less and less noticeable.

I was told I had to use the bandaids on my holes for showering and keep gauze on them too for just two more days and I could also throw the vest away then. I still felt too sensitive to get rid of the vest yet and wore it for another week, I still have it in case I want it for now (been going without it for about three days at this point) it still feels very strange without it since it feels like it’s holding you together but I think no matter how healed you are it will a shock to your body to not have that on anymore...also the “holes” from the tubes are more like slits which just look like slightly more open areas of the incisions so it’s barely noticeable. there’s some swelling where that used to be but that’s going down!

now at this point where I’m at, I still feel best putting ointment on with gauze and bandage wraps I bought as a transition from the vest to nothing under the shirt which seems to be working pretty well! it might be that I’m autistic that I’m so sensitive to that feeling and had to have my vest on longer and now this instead of nothing. also I took three weeks off of work initially (I work a desk job) and asked for a couple more weeks of working from home before going back to the office to be able to adjust

also I will say if you live alone, I think you can handle surgery and taking care of yourself if you’re determined, as long as nothing you need to use to feed yourself and whatnot is up too high, too low, or too heavy. but if you can I’d highly suggest staying with someone who can help take care of you, it really helps easy the transition. in my summary I will say there was almost no pain at all but a whole lot of WEIRD stuff I wasn’t used to, but in the end it’s not a whole lot to deal with, considering!

#I hope this can help someone at all!! feel free to ask questions or anything!! take care

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eds-zebra-warrior · 3 years

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2021 Ehlers Danlos Society Awareness Month (Day 8 Prompt: Movement and Activity

Movement and Activity can be very limited for those with EDS, especially those who have more severe symptoms and comorbidities. You may think of exercising as a run around the block or taking a trip to the gym. Others may think of exercise like going to physical therapy and peddling on a stationary bike slowly walking on a treadmill or working with elastic band. Exercise isn't always something that gets you out of breathe or your heart rate way up. For someone with EDS and some other conditions, exercise can take on a totally different meaning. Exercise can be some movements or positions that those who are healthy take for granted and do effortlessly without thinking twice about.

Exercise for us could be as simple as sitting up for a certain amount of time, remembering to change positions more often so we don't get blood clots, one of my exercises was rocking. Sitting on the couch and rocking back and forth or side to side just to get my bones moving a little bit to try to relieve some of my pain. doing light stretches or putting on AFO leg braces and sitting with our legs straight out on the couch to give them a little stretch to prevent furthering of spasticity I am one in a handful of EDS patients who cannot walk at all and is paralyzed from the waist down.

Though many EDS patients may have exercise plans such as walking to the mailbox and back each day, or bouncing on a balance ball, I do not have that ability do such activities and with my spinal issues which insurance will not cover the repair of it can be extremely dangerous for me to do things like this. For me sometimes it just a matter of lying on the couch on my back and trying to slide my foot up so my knee is bent and the bottom of my foot is flat on the couch with as little use of my hands as I can then extend it out straight again pushing with what little I still have in my legs, using my hands as little as possible to get it back straight out on the couch. I will also try this up by sliding it on the couch and trying to extend it by pressing my leg out, using a little help from my hands as possible to pull it back up which is much harder than doing so lying down. Many who are paralyzed or have paralysis have some movement in their legs, especially with a partial spinal cord injury but the movement usually isn't enough to do much with.

I cannot stand or support my own body weight on my legs but on my good days and in socks or shoes without clingy soles I can sometimes slide my foot back on my footplate if I go over a bump or something and my foot slides forward or off. This too is exercise by using what little I have to the best of my ability. I may not be able to lift my leg or move it well but sometimes I can slide it which is better than nothing. My doctors do not like me doing this anymore due to Osteoporosis however I still occasionally will put my KAFO leg braces on which have locks on them to lock my leg straight so my knee cannot bend and simply stand up in them. My legs cant do much as without them my knees would go out and I would go straight onto the floor but they do allow my body weight to distribute into my legs and my circulatory system to get some practice circulating blood in an upright position.

Another issue with EDS is movement disorders which is something I struggle with, sometimes worse than other times, especially in the evenings and when I have done too much. As mentioned in previous posts, the compression of my spinal cord. With so many nerves going through the spinal cord and brain, putting pressure and stress on those nerves result in them misfiring. I actually had this issue as a kid before we knew what it was but at the time it was only in my hand. My wrist would jerk so my hand, on the side of my thumb would jerk up towards my inner arm.

As an adult sometimes my legs will involuntarily kick or I will go spats so my legs won't bend and will hover several inches in front of my chair with my feet twisting inward and upward. I’ll have full body jerks kind of like what sometimes happens when you have those dreams of falling and your body jerks upon waking up but it will happen several times in a row and then several times in a row a few minutes later where my spine goes very straight then flaccid. I will also have facial ticks or full body ticks where the small muscles in my body will start twitching. When this happens in my GI system and respiratory system, it can get really scary because it can make me vomit, unable to swallow anything, give me blurry vision when my eyes start twitching or make it hard to breathe as I cannot control these smaller muscles. Some light stretches can reduce speciosity and stretch these muscles which doesn't reduce the neurological issues but reduces the muscular responses to those.

Movement and activity plans for someone like me may seem too easy or simple but until I can get a surgery to repair some of my neurological, brain and spine manifestations simple is about as good as it gets. The biggest goal of my movement activities is to prevent further sparsity, blood clots and to try to make it so that my heart and autonomic nervous system don't get to a point of no return if we can ever get my surgery approved or another treatment is found. You use it or you lose it so we are trying to prevent me from loosing any more function without going the other way and decreasing my movement through further damage to my spinal cord. It can be quite the fine line between not enough and too much so maintaining that balance is the current goal when it comes to movement and activity and its play in my daily life.

#MyEDSChallenge #MyHSDChallenge

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honeydewplaydough · 3 years

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Childish Laughter & Bleeding Scars

Cross posted on AO3 ! Can you guys tell me that Nie Mingjue is my favorite character lol?

What an unfortunate sight he must be, thought Nie Mingjue as he sputtered out blood through fleeting breaths. Coughs shook his whole frame. Suspended by his wrist, he hung mere inches off the ground. If he had been just a couple of inches taller, maybe he would be able to at least rest some of his body weight on the tips of his toes. But for now, he hung bonelessly, arms pulled tight. The pain was a dull ache that spread through the entirety of his shoulders and down to the middle of his back.

Nie Mingjue figured he would have rather suffered the grueling sharp pains of a hundred stab wounds than what seemed like the slow tearing of muscles.

The man leaned his head against the cold of the wall, allowing for at least the merciful kiss of relief on the back of his head. For if the lavish Sun Palace were warmth, the warmth of alcohol, the warmth of bodies pressing together, and the warmth of blood splattering across the floors, then the dungeons were the depths of a winter raging sea.

Deadly. Cold. Merciless.

Another cough wrecked his Nie Mingjue’s body. He had, at one point, attempted to count the days however the only light sources were the unreliable brightness of the lanterns that somehow flickered out on their own free will and left him in periods of darkness that never seemed to end. To pour salt in the wound, the servants also did not feed him in a coherent and a time measurable manner.

To be fair, however, feeding him was a strong word. They brought him scraps of supposed food when they damned well pleased.

And besides, eating the food prepared by any Wen Dog’s hand was not a luxury Nie Mingjue was willing to extend to them.

Furthermore, with his Qi haphazardly sealed, he would not be able to fight off the poison they would inevitably force-feed him once it had entered his body. He would be forced to witness what it would do to his body in full force. Would it make him vomit his intense up? Would it make him lose his teeth and have his gums be raw and exposed? Cause unscratchable itches that would leave him howling like some sort of maddened animal?

He would not let them have a chance to bear witness to it.

The lurch of his body forward strained his muscles and for a moment made him forget about his thoughts. He felt the clot of blood forcing its way up to his throat and down to the ground to where all the blood had trickled down from his chin and accumulated there at his exposed feet.

Worse than that was the blood that laid at his feet did not come from his own turbulent inwards.

It was also so that his body was covered from head to toe in wounds. Slices of varying degrees tore from shoulders down. A particularly nasty one had stretched from belly button to naval. Hundreds of them littered over his body, some of them being calculated slices meant to remove the top layer of skin, skinning him as if he were some sort of vegetable. Others meant to cut down deep and not a single thought was spared to the carnage that the knife took with it when it was pulled from his skin.

He couldn’t say which he had preferred.

All Nie Mingjue could do was simply hang there in silence as various torturers used his body as their canvas. Each one of them probably hoped to be praised when their Sect Leader came back from the battle he had so leisurely attended.

Just thinking about the man-made and anger run through his veins. The man that had slain his father in such a meticulous way that no blame could ever be put on to him. The man that bought our mercenaries to come and hack away at his borders, causing him both inconvenience and weeks of little sleep.

The man that haunted his dreams starting from his youth to adulthood.

Let it be known, however, that if Nie Mingjue were to see that bastard face to face, he’d kill him. He wasn’t twelve anymore. He’d face him like the man that he was and would take his head back to QingHe. For himself. To prove to himself that his youth was not a waste. That Wen Ruohan could not harm him anymore.

He would show the head off to his people. To not only to inspire them, that it was possible to shoot down the sun and conquer evil, but that as long as he stood here alive on this earth, he would always protect them.

An offering for Lan Xichen. To show him that there was nothing to be afraid of. That Nie Mingjue would move mountains, conquer the sun, and show him that he was worthy.

Revenge for Nie Huaisang. Former Clan Leader Nie had been both their fathers. He had smiled down at them all the same, had picked up Nie Huaisang, and had held Nie Mingjue by the hand. He told them stories of ole underneath the starry nights.

Nie Huaisang had loved their dad too.

To bring him the head of the one who killed him, would show that Nie Mingjue would protect him and would make do on the promise he made when he was still just a youth.

He just hoped that his little useless brother wouldn’t try and turn into something it was not.

‘Oh, da-ge! Why must I work so tirelessly out on the field every day if one, the war is over, and two, you’ve already shot the son out of the sky! If anything, now is the perfect opportunity to laze around! Discover new hobbies, pick up an ancient craft! Who knows, maybe by the end of summer, I’ll become a talented flute player. One that will shake the entire cultivation world and seize them up by their necks!’

Nie Mingjue let out a snort, as he pictured his brother saying it. It sounded close enough to him and he couldn’t help but let out a small smile at the thought. The thought of his useless, no good, weak little brother being safe at night.

It was then, he heard a shuffling of feet from behind the entrance to his personal hellhole. He rolled his eyes, cursing the cowardice of the poor bastard. Was he not restrained? Were they transporting him somewhere? No, the last time they had tried that, he had needed at least seven Wen Dogs to drag him down the halls.

He tried to contain his snort at that memory.

It had caused Meng Yao to lose face, even if it was just other Wen Dogs of slightly lower rank, and that had made the beating he received earlier a bit more worth it.

But at the topic of hand, he was starting to get annoyed. What kind of grown man or woman shook like that? Did they not have the upper hand? Were they some poor servant here to dress his wounds?

Nie Mingjue was annoyed.

He had been slightly fevered and the ache in his shoulders and his back were only worsening. Whoever it was, Nie Mingjue couldn’t care less. Be it Wen Ruohan himself or a scrambling slave of a slave. They should at least have some face!

“I know you are there, you Wen Dog! Stop shuffling like a coward and face me,” Nie Mingjue snapped out.

The shuffling and rustling of robes paused for a moment. And a few steps were heard. For some reason, the more that Nie Mingjue paid attention to the noise, instead of it barely passing through his ears and onto his brain, he realized that the person had tiny feet. The pitter-patters of steps caused great confusion.

Had they sent down a small child to torture him? Had they sent a little servant boy to dress the wounds and toss down his scraps? What was he doing here?

“Doggie?” Came the small voice.

Nie Mingjue furrowed his eyebrows. The child did not sound over the age of three years old. What game were those bastards playing? What kind of monster sends down a child? Had it not been Nie Mingjue and the boy had come closer to another war criminal, he was still little enough that he could simply be kicked out of the way.

Suddenly, the boy was standing in front of him behind the bars. One hand was gripping the bars as he plastered himself against them.

“I… The Doggie?” He asked excitedly pointing to himself. He looked to be searching for something on Nie Mingjue’s face, “Woof Woof!”

#nie mingjue #nie huaisang #wen rouhan #meng yao #jin guangyao #fanfiction #mo dao zu shi #lan yuan #lan sizhui #a-yuan #the untamed #mdzs #fic writing

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irelise · 4 years

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Fic “Behind the Scenes” - Alex Rider

Trying to dip my toes back into writing, so I thought I’d ramble about some fics I’ve already written! This started off as ranting about my title choice and how they’re usually Final Fantasy XIV songs I butcher in order to forcibly fit the fic, but it expanded into musings about things that didn’t make the cut into the final fic, and potential sequels/things that happen down the line.

Just doing Alex Rider fics for now since that’s my current active fandom, but drop me an ask if there are any fics you’re especially interested in from any fandom!

Starting off with: Time (2368 words, gen, Alex & Yassen focused) aka my untagged Inception-flavoured AU where the plot twist was that it was a dream all along That said, this title was probably one of the easiest to come up with and was obviously from the main theme of Inception, Time! Which is fantastic like the whole movie aaaa i love Inception AUs and this fic is probably the one I’m most likely to expand into longfic if I dredge up the motivation from somewhere. It would be a mission style fic, possibly a heist, where Alex and Yassen are seemingly working together in order to steal some valuable intel from another group. Of course, it’s all a dream! Through copious dream symbolism and mind fuckery the real mission was set up by MI6 for Alex to extract intel from Yassen, who by this point is steadily losing his grip on dreams and reality after months, possibly years, spent under sedation.

Yassen has a few tricks up his sleeve, though. He’s aware that he’s (probably) dreaming and he can see the fractures in Alex’s resolve after such a long time of being used and manipulated by MI6. It would only take a little nudge to get Alex to defect -- or, at the very least, to escape.

So while Alex is busy trying to extract information from Yassen, Yassen is trying to do the opposite: inception.

The rest below cut for length and also because they’re nsfw since most of my writing was for the kink meme! Warning for general fucked-upness and unhealthy relationships

at the end, on a dusty road (8154 words, Yassen/Alex) aka the reputation sabotage fic, aka where’s part 3b?!

Title from Origa’s Polyushka Polye:

The wind scatters your brave songs Across the green field. Songs of the past, Leaving them alone with your glory, And right at the end, on a dusty road…

i just wanted something wistful and Russian about past soldiers and fading glory ok....... I came pretty close to titling the fic leaving them alone with your past glory but decided it didn’t make much sense out of context.

ANYWAY my first Yalex fic! Very much inspired by a hodgepodge of comments on Discord about how MI6 would react if they ever saw Yassen paying Alex visits in the middle of the night - “Could they be exchanging information?” “The whole night? Maybe the answer is something more obvious...”

ANYWAY the ending at the moment is pretty open - there’s two main ways I see it going:

1) Yassen comes back shortly afterwards, realises he had fucked up colossally, stays and helps Alex rebuild even though Alex (very justifiably) no longer trusts him. Very slow reconciliation and healing but ultimately happy ending.

2) aka the one where I broke Nanibun’s shipper heart over Discord: Alex and Yassen eventually reunite, but it isn’t until years later, when Alex is nearing middle age and Yassen has faded into obscurity. Alex managed to pick up the pieces of his life and even moved on properly from MI6, and now lives a fulfilling life. Married, 2.5 kids, white picket fence, the whole lot. So what if his marriage is more for partnership than for love? He’s content with the direction his life had taken and has strong ties to his community. He even managed to forgive Yassen, even though it took him a long time.

He and Yassen meet for the last time in a sunlit cafe in spring. Alex looks at Yassen and sees only a stranger with lines crinkling under his eyes.Yassen is getting old, he realizes. He thinks he should be happy that Yassen even had the chance to get old, but all he feels is relief that their paths had diverged. Alex is done with that life and he can never trust Yassen again. All that old passion had burned away to nothing, not even a flickering flame. Even though the initial parting had been painful, Alex had managed to find peace long ago, and he hopes Yassen will be able to do the same. But it's a distant, unemotional hope, the sort of hope you'd have for a distant acquaintance you haven't seen in years. The type of well wishes that are etiquette more than actual sentiment.

He's glad when their drinks are finished and Yassen melts away into the chattering springtime crowd, one final dangling chapter of his life closed at last.

...............or, 3) Alex throws himself into increasingly dangerous situations in an attempt to feel something and dies young.

(part 3b is coming someday i swear! it’s the alternate path where Yassen has second thoughts, tells Alex the truth, and doesn’t send the sex tape to MI6)

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Lemniscate (3562 words, Julia Rothman/Yassen) Not a whole lot to say about this one, except after I finished I realised it was really similar to another fic I previously wrote which also involved a young man desperate to reinvent himself completely being taken advantage of by his superior............ i have a Type

Title - I was jamming out to Locus while writing this which is a song all about an inability to escape from cycles - When fighting back right out of this system/Means falling back right into this space ; When falling back is better than simply/Falling back into pieces again - but it was long and unwieldy so I thought about shortening it to Moebius but that was a bit overdone... In the end I settled with Lemniscate which is also an infinity symbol, Moebius-like shape. Mostly it’s a reference to how Yassen never quite breaks free of his “cycle” even though he’s with Scorpia now - he was Sharkovsky’s slave and bedwarmer and...now he plays basically the same role for Julia Rothman. (Just with a bit more murder and moral erosion!)

---

This probably needs a special content warning - major character death (gun suicide from the second Russian roulette scene), gore, necrophilia

closing the circle (3650 words, John Rider & Yassen) aka is it still a gen fic if there’s offscreen necrophilia?

This was originally written for a kink meme prompt for corpse mutilation + necrophilia but then the John and Yassen plot thread kind of took over and I never actually ended up writing the gory stuff oops since it was too out of place compared to the rest. So everything below can be considered not “canon” since the fic diverged so heavily from its original plan (which is why the section numbers skip around - I cut out Yassen’s bits). But if you’re curious, here’s the details for what I originally planned to happen to Yassen (well, his corpse) and the Sharkovsky family, copy-pasted straight from my notes and full of as much karma as I could stuff in:

Yassen’s death, Sharkovsky shoves his fingers in the bullet hole and spits on the body in disgust. Yassen regains consciousness halfway through this; he can feel what Sharkovsky is doing

Ivan comes running in, attracted by the sound of the gunshot. Sharkovsky tells him to do what he likes with the body as long as it’s disposed of in the end. Necrophilia scene? Afterwards Ivan disposes of the body by locking it in the cellar alone with the Dalmatian for a few days

Yassen starts getting his revenge. Ivan is the first to go when he comes to let the Dalmatian out – the Dalmatian savages him and tears out his throat before it’s finally shot. Yassen’s bones get buried along with the Dalmatian. Ivan’s body is kept in the cold storage room in the basement where they kept the old food taster’s body while they decide what to do with him.

Maya, Sharkovsky’s wife, is next. She passes away in the middle of the night. Sharkovsky wakes up next to a cooling corpse.

There are whispers that there is some sort of curse. One of the maids talk about finding blood on the carpet of Sharkovsky’s study. She’s the next to disappear. Some other workers stop turning up.

Finally it’s Sharkovsky’s turn. He dies of poison. The dacha burns down that same night.

A Scorpia agent was sent to tie up loose ends (Scorpia didn’t know Sharkovsky is already dead); Yassen kills him too. He has no loyalty to Scorpia and just wants to be left alone.

Hunter is sent to investigate. He and Yassen talk, in the end, Hunter invites Yassen to come with him, Yassen agrees. But when they leave the dacha and Hunter looks back, he finds that Yassen is gone.

And an excerpt:

Yassen is dead. He does not remember dying. There are some things the human mind tries to shield itself from, and the memory of a bullet traveling through bone and brain to erupt on the other side in a shower of gore is one of those things.

Yassen is dead. He had hoped death would mean oblivion. At his most naïve and optimistic, he had hoped death would mean reunion. Happiness. A return to simpler days.

He discovers, instead, that death is not so different from life, except he is even more powerless now than before.

There is a body on the floor of Sharkovsky’s study. Its hair had once been pale white-blond, but now it is matted with coagulating blood. That same blood spreads in a dark pool against the carpet, clotting the fibres together into ugly clumps, stiff and flaking. The fire in the hearth is still burning sullenly. Its light glistens against the grotesque strands of viscera splattered against the ground, the furniture, the wall. A round hole had been punched into the side of the corpse’s head, piercing bone and brain. That was how the man who had once been Yassen Gregorovich had killed himself. The fingers of the corpse remain loosely curled around the old-fashioned revolver that had been the instrument of death.

The only living person in the room rises slowly from his wheelchair. Sharkovsky’s skeletal face is twisted into an ugly grimace of anger. He totters over to the corpse, nudging it with the tip of one polished leather shoe. “Waste of time,” he says coldly. “Ruining a perfectly good carpet, and for what?”

In a sudden fit of temper, he lashes out with a kick. Once, it would have been strong enough to break several ribs (Yassen knows from intimate experience). Now, the corpse merely flops limply to one side. It incenses Sharkovsky further. He drops heavily to his knees, breathing harshly, and backhands the corpse across the face with one shaking hand.

#fandom: alex rider #My writing #meta

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lisatelramor · 4 years

Text

Be a Better Me

Hi, I’m back with angst fic. >_>

So with COVID19 going on I 1) had more time to write + 2) have had a bit more background anxiety with the world, and stress + time = angstfic for me most of the time. So this got written in about a month. Instead of any of my WIPs =_=;;;;; Hope other people are up for some angst. Either way I'm being sent back to work next week so I'm glad it chose to finish when it did.

This was 100% inspired by @ickaimp's Robo!Kaito fic and has probably low key kicked around my brain for years since I read it back in like 2011.

Chapter 1

His arm aches. Kaito flexes his hand, blood running down from the bullet graze that feels like fire. The robot that impersonated him is wires and synthetic skin smoking in a pile. He feels sick in his stomach, both from almost dying after a few days trapped in a lab and because he’d just seen something that had run around with his face blow its own head off.

It’s just a robot, but it’d thought it was human. It’d thought it was him, had seen his memories, just hadn’t quite been human enough to understand life, death, or morals. What kind of sick fuck made something like that?

Kaito shudders. His hand flexes again. Bandages. He needs bandages, and maybe stitches, or maybe to just. Go lie down.

His skin doesn’t feel quite right but that’s the shock probably. A lot’s happened in a couple days’ time. Like finding out someone with his face killed someone. A creepy scientist who also kidnapped Kaito, but yeah. How anything that had Kaito’s memories and personality could do that… He shudders again.

Kaito isn’t a megalomaniac in disguise right? He has lines and morals and things he’d never do in a million years, even if some of his morals are grayer than others. He doesn’t hurt people. Not physically permanent. And not any other way if he can help it.

Blood drips from his fingertips.

There’s a laboratory burning down with a corpse of a man who tried to make a man from metal out there and Kaito doesn’t want anything more to do with it.

He turns away. He has a gem to return and a budding reputation to save.

o*O*o

He feels weird for a while after that. It’s the trauma probably. Kaito can’t say his life has ever been normal. His father was a stage magician, both his parents turned out to be thieves, and he puts on a white suit to stir up shadows to try and find out why his father was murdered. That’s hardly the sort of thing a teenager usually goes through, but killer robots and kidnapping were new. His balance a bit off for a day? He spent two days strapped to a table. His arm took a bit to work right? He did get grazed by a bullet. Swimming takes a bit more effort than the last time he did it? Not weird since he generally avoids swimming in the ocean if he can. Aoko’s mop swings seem a little slower? He’s kind of hyper aware of attacks lately, so he’s just paying more attention.

Things are different but not that different so it’s just his head being weird about it all. Life goes on, he stops feeling a bit off and he keeps on going as usual. Bait Aoko, play like a good student, perform magic, and pull of the next heist. Simple.

But then there’s suddenly a magic wielding witch and a detective trying to sniff him out, and life just keeps getting weirder. He doesn’t remember it being this strange before he became Kid, but it must have been at least a little weird. It’s just that practicing magic and acrobatics with Aoko and actual magic and jumping off buildings are very different things. It’s a miracle he’s managed not to break anything. What with the roller coaster, or jumping off buildings, or getting shot at, or ghost(?) pirates, or being attacked by a hoard of hairy rats… Yeah. Life is weird.

So if Kaito’s a little weird in it, well, he fits right in, now doesn’t he?

o*O*o

Kaito’s chest is aching and there’s a nasty bruise forming. He supposes that’s what happens when a gem blocks a bullet. It’s yet another miracle the sapphire didn’t shatter let alone that the bullet hit it instead of him at all. Aoko liked her birthday gift but it had taken all Kaito had to set that up for her and he’s dead on his feet now.

He might have a cracked rib too. He winces, easing off the costume. It has a hole—two really where the bullet deflected—that will need patched and the usual bleach treatments to keep it white. White is the worst color for climbing around rooftops and crawlspaces. He’d change it if it wasn’t for the fact that it’s one of Kid’s signature identifiers at this point. Thanks, Oyaji.

The bruise is worse than he first thought when he gets his shirt off. Mottled purple all along the left side of his chest. Like someone took a wooden mallet to him.

Thankfully there’s an x-ray machine down in Kid’s hideaway. It’s old and definitely not something he’s going to ever use much because, well, radiation, but he’d rather know if he’s managed to break a rib or not so he knows how much acrobatics he can get away with.

It takes a bit to set up and a bit longer to figure out how to get everything to work, but fifteen minutes later he’s got x-ray film developing in a little darkroom off to the side because apparently his dad had a little bit of everything thought out down here. He loves and hates it in equal measures sometimes.

He sighs, feeling the deep breathing ache, and looks at the forming image. And frowns.

He’s not a medical expert, far from it, but he has a general run down of the human body and has seen x-rays before. What Kaito’s looking at? Not what he’d expect to see. There’s ribs, yes, but they’re not quite right, and too dark. Then there’s all the metal. It’s like his nervous system is registering as wires, radiating out like something from one of his textbooks, same with the circulatory system that’s a bit too dark on the film. Should he even be seeing that? Heart, maybe, but branching signs of the rest of his veins and arteries? His lungs aren’t the right shape. The vague shadows of organs aren’t right either. And there’s… there’s the shadow of screws and pins and mechanical bits that shouldn’t be there. There’s wires instead of tendons that shouldn’t be showing and he has to stare.

His chest throbs and he looks down at it. Bruising. At the film. Barely resembling something human. He hurts. Aches. Yet there in front of him is mechanical parts.

Feeling like he’s floating, or maybe sinking, Kaito plucks one of his razor cards from its deck. He slides it along his finger. Skin parts, blood wells up, pain registers dimly.

But is it blood?

It drips, just a few drops, already clotting as he stares. It’s red as any blood he’s seen. The pain is real. And yet. He looks at the film.

Kaito hasn’t thought about the robot in months. Why would he? It’s over and done. He’d read a police report about the lab in the paper. About the body found and the equipment sitting in police evidence for ages as the murder case went cold. They didn’t know to look for a robot. And the robot had been left for scrap. Kaito doesn’t know what had happened to its remains.

There hadn’t been a second body found.

He looks back at his hand and finds it shaking.

The robot’s face had peeled off, but when he tugs at his cheek he just feels pain. Same with his hair. He feels. He eats and shits and sleeps and bleeds. His breath is coming too fast and it hurts.

It’s a mistake, right? He could take another scan and it’d be normal. Human. He could scan his hand and it would be bone and tendons and the ghost of muscle, not wire and metal joints that would make a prosthetic expert weep. Not too-dark veins and tendrils of nerves that shouldn’t be visible.

His lungs were the wrong shape, he couldn’t breathe.

“Shit.”

He’s Kaito, right? Just a normal teenager with an abnormal life. Just a normal, human teenager.

The robot thought it was human.

The robot thought it was Kaito.

Kaito doesn’t remember being taken, he just remembers waking up strapped down. But the robot barely passed as human. But Kaito has wires in his chest.

He looks at the film again. “Well. No cracked rib.” He laughs. It’s not funny at all. He can’t breathe. “What do I do?”

The empty basement hideaway his father left him has no answers at all.

Like usual, it’s just Kaito facing crisis alone.

He’s never felt worse.

o*O*o

Eventually, he picks himself off the floor. Eventually he changes into new clothes. Eventually he slides into bed and sleeps, terribly, but sleeps. He sees his face melting in his dreams, a broken metallic skull leaking fluid and smoke and blank mechanical eyes staring at him. His skin peeling away to show metal bones and wires as everyone he loves stares in horror.

Kaito wakes up feeling like he’s going to throw up, in a cold sweat. He can dream and sweat and feel sickening terror, surely he’s wrong. Surely.

But the x-ray is the same damning image this morning as it was last night.

Kaito’s hands start shaking again.

If he goes into class, Hakuba will take one look at him and know something’s up. Hell, Aoko will notice. He laces his fingers together. Poker face. Poker face. Whatever is going on, he’s still been Kaito for months without noticing anything wrong so. So maybe he’s… a cyborg or something. A robot wouldn’t be having a panic attack about being a robot. Who would want to make a robot capable of having a panic attack in the first place?

He doesn’t know what the hell is going on, but he needs answers before he can do anything else.

Kaito calls in sick, leaves Aoko a message so she doesn’t show up demanding he get ready for school. Eats plain toast without tasting it—how can he taste it?—and slides on his shoes. His chest is a mass of dark bruises just like a human body that had a bullet deflected should be. But nothing under his skin is apparently human.

It’s easy to slip into the police record room with a borrowed face, and a matter of minutes to seek out the mad doctor’s case record. His charred remains are photographed in gristly glory front and center, but his cause of death isn’t fire. Kaito knows his hands don’t have the sort of strength to do what that file describes.

He almost throws up looking at it.

There’s lab equipment listed off, melted computers and bits of paper files to survive the destruction kept in evidence files. Kaito might need to come back and see what he can salvage from them. If he’s… not fully human, he might need some of the doctor’s research no matter how much the thought makes his skin crawl. There’s nothing in the file about the robot, but there is notes about unfinished pieces parts sifted from the wreckage. Police notes only speculate what they thought was going on in the labs.

The file doesn’t mention another body.

Kaito does a quick look into active unidentified male bodies found in the last few months, but none of them are young enough to be him. None of them recognizable. It should be a good thing.

It should be.

Instead it has Kaito’s breathing tight again because what if he died and no one ever found the body? What if he rots somewhere and no one will ever know he’s not. That’s Kaito’s not.

He leaves the police station.

There’s a disconnect between his self and emotions and it’s something he’s done before, but rarely outside of a heist. His poker face, most of the time, is an act. This is different. This is shutting bits of himself away because otherwise he couldn’t function. This is putting off a breakdown knowing it’ll be that much worse later. This is shutting a door knowing it’s going to open later and drown him.

He heads for the lab. It’s the only place he can think to go.

o*O*o

The building is condemned. It’s a burnt husk of a thing and a surprise that it hasn’t been torn down yet. Perhaps the doctor had owned it and it’s in the air what to do with it. Either way, Kaito approaches with detached caution.

He can remember leaving here in a rush, the explosion that followed not long after he made it out. He can remember the sickening glimpse of a body on his way out, trying not to look too hard and knowing it’d haunt his nightmares. Kaito steps inside and pinpoints the twisted metal that was once where he was strapped down, the shattered remains of the memory transfer machines still imbedded into the wall behind it.

The police had removed a lot of things, but they couldn’t remove the scorch marks on the walls and floor or the dark bloodstains in the corner. He shivers.

What is he doing here? The scene was gone over by police. It’s not like he’s going to find something they didn’t, and it’s not like he’s going to know what any of the machine bits left can do beyond the memory transfer one.

It’s damp and drafty inside. It smells like wet ashes and chemicals and he wants to turn around and leave, especially when he sees a metal start of a skeleton still bolted to the back wall. How many had this guy made? How many robot failures before the one that Kaito fought? How many thought they were human? How many other people were kidnapped in the process of building these things?

Things. Robots were things. And Kaito was…

The wall had collapsed along one side, and no one had bothered to clear the rubble. If Kaito was a crazy robot building scientist that kidnapped teenagers, what would he do with them? Ok, he’d been strapped down to the memory machine. But if he built a robot and implanted memories in it, he’d want to compare, right? He’d want to prove that he’d done the transfer right, so he wouldn’t just get rid of the teenager. The robot Kaito faced had transferred memories fine, but the emotional and moral processes hadn’t been right. The doctor had been basing it off Kaito and if Kaito was. If he was then that meant the transfer had worked right on Kaito. Probably. And maybe the scientist had been trying to duplicate whatever happened with Kaito or maybe they’d been two different models for different purposes. Who the hell knew at this point? Certainly not Kaito.

Kaito prods at rubble. If there’s one thing he’s learned about people who have secrets to hide, things aren’t as they appear. This is a lab, but it’s missing living space. It’s missing storage and a metal foundry. The pieces that built the robots are too specialized to not be custom made. The cabinets that had existed had to have been full of wires and polymers and the fine details bits that you’d want a nice open workspace to better work with, but there had to be a place the doctor had done the base work and he’s not seeing any sign of it here. Just the start of the skeleton on the wall that’s missing its head and lower half.

He can’t look at it. It’s somewhere in between the scan Kaito took of his chest and the metal chassis from the robot he fought, its skin peeling back and—

There had to be a basement. Still is a basement probably. But the door is either hidden or buried, and Kaito’s not sure what to do first. Test the shattered remains of cabinet bases? Try scrounging through rubble? See if anything still hooked into the wall shifts and shows a hidden room like his painting at home?

The basement wouldn’t have been legally added or the police would have its existence on file for the building blueprints. But most of this place can’t have been legally built. Not with the amount of equipment secreted away. People would have asked questions. So. Hidden door.

Kaito estimates wall thicknesses versus the interior versus how dangerous it is to get close to places where the ceiling and walls are still crumbling bit by bit.

There’s a cabinet with shattered glass cases and medical supplies that have all been taken away as evidence. Kaito vaguely remembers it before the explosion. Despite half a roof caving in around it, it’s still in one piece structurally and that means it’s built stronger than a cabinet should be.

It takes twenty minutes of careful prodding and digging and tugging to get it to budge and when it does it shrieks like rusted hinges. But Kaito keeps pulling and gets a space big enough for him to crawl through, stairs traveling down.

It’s dark and even mustier than above. The floor must have cracked or the foundations, and it’s growing mold, but Kaito’s surprised to find it isn’t completely dark. Somehow there’s still power running here, probably underground. The overhead lights are shattered but in the gloom are a few red blinking lights of appliances.

Kaito wants to turn back but he’s never been one to shy away from the truth.

Glass crunches under his shoes as his small pocket flashlight illuminates fragments of the dark. A table. A kitchen. A bed, all in the first room, but heavy metal doors beyond. They’re warped though, and the ceiling sags ominously where a support beam crumpled slightly from the explosion above. Kaito has no idea how it didn’t get destroyed with the rest of the place, but it had to have been the placement of explosives.

He creeps further, leaving the eerily normal living area for one of the metal doors. It’s stuck, but he gets it to move enough to squeeze past, his ribs protesting the movement. It’s fine. It’s not important. The room is the metal foundry he’d expected, casts and tools and carefully disguised air vents branching off. It’s heavily reinforced, probably also muffled so the metalwork didn’t make too much noise. He sees finished metal bones, all sorted neatly into labeled bins and racks of molds. There’s a half-finished skull just sitting there on a work bench, empty eye sockets unnerving.

Kaito wrenching his eyes away from it. There’s papers and diagrams, documents on the doctor’s research about how the robotic body comes together, about alloys and density and weights that Kaito should keep if it ever becomes something he needs—He drops the thought into that emotional void growing in his head.

If he needs anything from here, he will take it. And will not think about what it means.

The documents about the muscular, nervous, circulatory and digestive systems aren’t here. Might not even exist anymore. But there had been a personal computer in the living space and it had glass littering it like the floor, but it wasn’t destroyed. It was one of the blinking red lights, so maybe…

Kaito’s taking that when he leaves.

The other metal door is warped worse than the foundry. Kaito has to go and get a metal femur to lever the gap wide enough to pass through and he’s surprised to find the inside almost fully intact.

One light flickers on, the only bulb not destroyed. He’s not sure at first what the room is. There’s a filing cabinet by the door, sure, but also a chest freezer and something that looks like an opaque glass case except there are wires running to it and an electric hum that’s louder than the freezer. Something in his instincts prickle and Kaito can’t explain the heavy terrified feeling bubbling in his gut the longer he stares at the simple room in the dim, flicker light.

Glass crunches and he tugs the freezer lid up. He’s half expecting to find a dismembered corpse in there. There’s not a corpse but there is vial after vial of dark liquids with strings of numbers on them and containers labeled ‘skin’ with numbers after them. The liquid looks a lot like blood. Kaito’s stomach lurches. The other containers are opaque and thankfully impossible to tell the contents of, though they could be organs, real or synthetic. Kaito really hopes the skin is synthetic.

He lets the lid close and tugs the file cabinet drawers. Locked, but he can easily get in them later. That leaves the glass case.

It has a computerized box attached to the front with strings of numbers displayed that mean absolutely nothing to Kaito. There’s controls too, but the only one he cares about is the one that opens the glass case. It unlocks with a pneumatic hiss, like its contents were under pressure and Kaito swings the glass up.

And stares down at his face.

Peaceful. Like it’s asleep. He’s asleep. But his lips are bluish and his skin is pale and, when Kaito reaches out with a shaking hand, he’s cold to the touch.

The police never found a second body.

The room goes a little sideways and dark and Kaito realizes only after his face is mashed against the metal edge of the glass case that he’s hyperventilating.

“Shit,” he hisses through chattering teeth. “Shit.” His hair’s standing on end and his whole body is shaking and he’s having a panic attack next to his own corpse. “Shit.” It shouldn’t be possible to have a panic attack when he isn’t even real.

The room keeps spinning and blinking bright and dark as he tries to control his breathing. Shit, how can he hyperventilate when he doesn’t have real lungs and maybe not even a real brain—unless. He pops back up like a man drowning and scrabbles for the case.

He tilts Kai—the body’s head one way or another, but there’s no sign of it being cut open. The hair’s the same wiry texture he feels when he touches his head and there’s no injury he can feel. The knobs of its spine along the neck are intact. There’s wires, now that he’s looking, glued at the temples, but they’re not going in the body. There’s wires other places too and he has a stupid, fleeting moment of gratitude that at least the sick fuck that did this left Kaito’s underwear on. The body’s. Shit. There’s no marks and no indication of what happened, but the body isn’t breathing and there’s no pulse at its throat and it’s Kaito’s body right there.

It’s him but it’s not because Kaito isn’t.

He has to let go of the body and take three steps away to empty the meager contents of his stomach on the glass-littered floor. Stomach bile burns his throat. Is it even stomach acid? Is it even—how is he digesting if he’s wires and not-quite-organs? What is he?

He’s crying and hiccupping and he can’t quite seem to stop, the sour taste in his mouth and the smell of mold in his nose. What was the point in making a robot so close to human it can’t tell the difference between flesh and machine? What’s the point of a machine that can cry and vomit and panic like a real person? What’s the point of killing a teenager to replace him with a machine?

He crouches for an unknown period of time until the panic sort of flat lines and his tears dry. His hands stop shaking and his throat is raw, each breath a rasp. He bleeds and feels pain and emotions and—

Kaito goes back to the body. His body. Say the memory transfer worked. Say that Kaito in his entirety went from human flesh and bone to this. Intact. Say that the process fried Kaito’s brain and the doctor was left with a comatose teenager and a robot that didn’t know it was a robot. What would the doctor do with his mistake? Was the case to preserve the corpse? To keep the body as reference or had there been another purpose?

Or maybe the process hadn’t fried Kaito’s brain. Maybe the real Kaito had looked at his double. At the other Kaito and tried to break free. Maybe he’d been sedated or something else went wrong. But maybe that Kaito had died in terror and left an imposter in his place.

Kaito will never know.

There is no sign of decomposition. No sign of the body going through rigor mortis or any kind of trauma. Like he’s just sleeping. Like a few tiny stimuli could open the hidden blue eyes and the body would rise up and express how frigging cold it is in the case.

Maybe, for a scientist playing god, that had been the intent. Make a man from scratch achieved, next step bring back the dead. The first person to successfully revive a cryo patient.

Kaito closes his eyes, then closes the glass case. He can’t look at his own body anymore. He can’t. It seals with another hiss, preserving the body for however long the machine keeps running.

What the hell is he supposed to do?

He presses the heels of his hands against his swollen eyes. It’s not right to leave this here. It’s not right for any of this to be left here. It’s not right for Kaito to take the place of the real Kaito either but he doesn’t know what the hell to do. He’s been taking his place for months now; what else is there for him?

Is it better or worse if he is, in fact, a complete imprint of Kaito’s brain? Would he even know the difference if something is missing?

Worst of all, no one noticed. Not Aoko. Not Kaito or Jii. Not Kaito’s own mother. No one.

Kaito died alone. And no one noticed.

He’s crying again, not sure if it’s for himself or for the body at his back. Months. Months.

The overhead light flickers out and all at once Kaito can’t stay here. It’s like he’s the one in the box, trapped and slowly running out of air, and he squeezes out the door and up the stairs before he can even process moving. He doesn’t stop until he’s up a tree and breathing smoke and mold free air and trying to stop trembling. ‘What now?’ his mind asks. ‘What now, what now, what now?’

It’s night when he finally moves. He doesn’t know how long he sat up a tree, can’t remember the sun going down, only knowing that his body aches everywhere from stillness and unforgiving solid tree limbs beneath his ass. He makes a call. “Jii?”

He doesn’t know what his voice sounds like, couldn’t pick up his poker face if he tried right now.

It must be horrible though because Jii’s voice comes through the line sharp and worried. “What’s happened?” he asks.

There’s no way to start, no words to draw on to explain the mess that this is. How does someone say that they’re dead? That they’re dead and not, human and not, all at the same time?

“Kaito-bocchama?” Jii says sharper.

“How good,” Kaito says, voice gone all wobbly and out of control, “is that friend of yours with robotics?”

“…Kaito-bocchama?” Jii says a lot more dubiously.

Kaito licks his lips with a dry tongue. Dry mouth. Probably dehydrated and doesn’t that make no sense for a robot to have that feature. “There’s a problem. And I don’t know what to do,” he admits.

He can’t say it. How can he say to Jii that Kaito’s dead, like Toichi is dead, to Kaito’s mom that he’s dead and there’s just this remnant body of wires and meat-mimicking mess wearing his face left? How can he do that?

“Where are you?” Jii says, the sound of him getting clothing, maybe or a coat in the background.

Kaito hesitates, but gives the address of the burned down lab. “How good is your friend with robotics?” he asks again.

“…It isn’t his specialty,” Jii says after a long moment.

“Ah.” Too much to hope for. Still, maybe this mysterious friend Jii gets the occasional gadget from will know how to read the research notes better than Kaito would. Keys jingle as Jii locks his front door. “Jii?”

“Yes?”

“I’m sorry, in advance,” Kaito says knowing it’s not enough. He hangs up before Jii can say anything in response and doesn’t pick up the return call. Instead he stuffs his phone in a pocket and covers his face with his hands and just breathes. If nothing else makes sense, at least he can do that.

#magic kaito #detective conan #robot kaito #fanfiction #my writing #not really shippy this time guys #but there's a lot of skirting the lines later #and much friendship #you know #between the angst moments

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